Live switched to Bing

A new beta test interface for Msn Live search

[angiolo]

Today I noted that search.live.com switched to www.bing.com.

It is a Beta version, maybe working only in some countries.
I got bing.conm here in Italy.

The Algo seems to me more "local".
I am curious about the way bing.com find local results: one factor seems IP location...

[dertyfern]

I like it. It's quick, has nice features, actually better at suggesting related terms that Google, and the local search is *way* better than Google's out of control spam problem.

[drall]

I must say, in my sector which is rather busy I am seeing results that really are better then g or yahoo.

[tangor]

I like it. Very usable. Perhaps we'll see more traffic from bing than live...

[mingscians]

i tested it and mt page 1 is no where to find

[MLHmptn]

And after day one I must say that I have seen a dramatic jump in referrals from bing. 38% from bing/live/msn, 44% from Google, 12% yahoo, and 1% ask, 5% unknown or direct. Hope this keeps up and people continue to use bing!

[edited by: MLHmptn at 5:39 am (utc) on June 2, 2009]

[Gomvents]

Honestly, I'm surprised how good it is!

I always keep an open mind, but I was very biased against MSFT coming out with a good search due to how crappy MSN and Live.com are. Bing results seems pretty good, the homepage with the new image and daily info is kinda cool- and traffic to client sites from Bing is about double of what MSN / Live was after only a couple of days!

How this continues to get better... also, why Bing? Why not revamp Live.com? Windows Live coming out soon? With Windows 7?

[nomis5]

Reading the comments, I thought I'd dropped into the Bing appreciation society pages!

As far as search share goes, Bing gets even less than Yahoo on my sites - 2.98% to be precise. It's early days though.

As far as SERPS go, it still returns the same old rubbish and corporate sites as Live did. Nothing has changed.

[gethan]

Launch day (June 1st) - bing.com provided about 1% of referrals - site in travel sector.

[tictoc]

looks a lot like google to me on some searches. but why bing over live.com? bing is a strange name to me.

[Asia_Expat]

I'm seeing top quality traffic coming from Bing today. Not as much as I'd like but sure more than I was getting from Live.

There's something right about the name IMO. It works but I don't know why.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

looks a lot like google to me on some searches. but why bing over live.com? bing is a strange name to me.

Google was also a very strange name initially...

[stuartmcdonald]

Really like the "also on this page" feature - similar to Google's sitelinks but more accessible.

Good results -- sending me double the traffic Live did, though as GA doesn't tag it as a search engine yet, I can't see the keywords people are using.

[graeme_p]

So far I am seeing slightly less traffic than I did from live.

It is too early to judge, but with a site like mine (a niche encyclopaedia type site) a lot of people will just read the summary on Bing and not click through to my site.

Given that Google has been sued (by news sites) for the tiny snippets it uses, how is MS able to get away with copying significant chunks of each page, and replaying whole videos?

[shri]

Google was also a very strange name initially...

But bing just sounds wrong when used as a verb.

[tangor]

There's something right about the name IMO. It works but I don't know why.

Because it is one letter shy of "Bingo!" (grins)

[Receptional]

When I clicked on the Country link at the top right and changed the selected country to US or UK am getting the same results as that using the US or UK IP respectively. So I hope using proxy is not required to see other country results.

Ha! I thought I had just found a way to get to the US results without a proxy from outside the states: [bing.com...] but it looks like the results are the same.... Infact, there must have been a change overnight, because now I don't seem to need a proxy.

Some folks say same results as Live, some say same results as G... Which is it?

We should remember that this is has gone live worldwide it seems, but that doesn't mean that every country is up to speed or has the same soppistication in results. As Webmasterworld is such an international community, we are seeing quite a variety of different results here. I wouldn't be surprised if there is also some difference between me in Bedford and my friends in Edinburgh.

[edited by: Receptional at 8:07 am (utc) on June 2, 2009]

[dudibob]

My referrals in Google Analytics are still saying 'Live' for yesterday, but Bing is so new, I'm not expecting any increase of traffic from it yet, wait until Microsoft launch this $80 mil campaign they've been banging on about then we'll start seeing some traffic from it

[Pass the Dutchie]

seems like my meta description is coming from ODP.

[blend27]

Image Search:

I have a FRAME Buster Installed via JavaScript.

"Displaying this page may force you to leave Bing Images. Opening the page in a new window will prevent this"

That's Cold... From What I remember I paid for the SLR Camera, Product, Photoshop and spent time perfecting the shot. I am not sure it is Bing Images. MS Lets call the things the way the should be called.

Other that that looks spiffy.

[Shaddows]

I like Bing. Its fast, and the scraped content is pretty good too. Unless you're a content provider, obvs.

Unfortunately, where we dominate google for a wide selection of high-conversion mid-tail terms, we're below the fold or even off page 1 on pretty much everything.

I'm also seeing the same domain taking multiple positions on page 1, which I'm not sure I like,

[malinkam]

using wayback machine there is history of bing available, 2005, 2006, and it became for sale in 2007 - wonder how much they got for it.

[2clean]

Getting lots of traffic from Bing. ;)

[zeus]

Bing images search is the best I have seen with a search engine and for that I want clear results and no bugs, if you do a site: search you get all your images WITH filter and they also dont have the hotlinking issue like google had for years, so very clean results with filter and no hotlinking sites show up.

[dannibecher]

It's very annoying that you have to float your cursor over an image in the image search to find out where it's from or indeed anything about it. Google image search is definately much better.

[dannibecher]

The news search is also a bit hit and miss, search for villa holidays and you get a story about Wino as number 4!

[zeus]

wow I now see that you can actually see results which are related to there domain, means I do a search on bing.com I then get results related to that domain "US results" before i always got a bad mix of the Country im in and us sites, now it really looks good, like google system GEo vise.

[bwnbwn]

Bing microsoft are in for some real big legal issues with the ability to watch #*$! from their site. Read a little on it yesterday and more today so I did a quick search as watched a hard core #*$! clip from Bing.

What does this do well the parents with safe search or filters now will have to add Bing a a site that can't be visited.

Not a real smart move as now millions will now block Bing I know I would if I had younger kids, what were they thinking.

[zeus]

maybe they have got to the european standard, but I dont think US ever will. I also tried a search with filter on I did not see anything bad, when I turned of I saw what i expected.

[httpwebwitch]

Image results are all over the place. I binged my own name, and in the image results I get a headshot of Alex Trebek. (btw my name is not alex, or trebek, and I have never been on Jeopardy).

I bing my WebmasterWorld alias, "httpwebwitch", and ... very prominently in the results I see a photo of Bob Denver (aka "Gilligan") attributed to WebmasterWorld.com. Hilarious!

And... amazing how many image searches for innocent keywords show results of young women showing off their bounty. Lots NSFW here.

[zeus]

About image results, what I think was great was they dont have a filter issue where a lot of images are filtered like on google for no reason and hotlinking images issue, about results well maybe not the best, but I would rather search on Bing then on Google be cause I get more results, on google you have to search without filter before you get results.