It feels like just yesterday that Microsoft had blessed the internet with its new search engine, Bing, and today we mobile addicts have access to this service on our phones. If you head over to m.bing.com on your handheld, you’ll find yourself on a lite version of this Bing’s titan service.
So does this compete with the Google’s mobile service? Not just yet, and it seems that Microsoft has omitted all those fancy features that has made Bing a near-overnight success.
I borrowed TechCrunch’s unique search results test to throw it through the mobile engine, here are the (disappointing) results:
- An ambiguous Web search: “turkey” – Does not offer any disambiguation, gives me a map of the country and a few images of that delicious holiday bird. On top of that, the specific search set my location as Turkey.
- A travel search: “SFO to JFK” – Nothing in relation to helping me book a flight, just some pictures of the aforementioned airports and a few travel sites.
- Image search: “Rollercoasters” – The image search on Bing Mobile is very similar to Google’s mobile image search, nothing too special here.
- A health search: “Sore throat” – Mobile Bing felt that my sore throat query was actually a news search about swine flu.
- Shopping: “Digital SLR” – This was actually pretty sweet, gave me very similar results to Bing native search.
- Maps: “BBQ” – No awesome map support, just a whole lot of awful clipart images.
- News Search: “Bing” – Well, news search is right on the money with this mobile engine.
Bing web service: Awesome; Bing mobile service: Mediocre. It’s understandable why they rushed their mobile product out the door (presence is key), but for goodness sake, Bing’s special features are what won me over. Until Bing mobile is up to speed with Bing’s web engine, I will continue to stay true to the ways of Google for mobile search.
Agree it’s not as good as it should have been given that they haven’t integrated all the features of the main Bing.
There are some ok features though, such as a search for ‘hotels in paris’ shows up local results with click to call phone numbers. Now that is useful on a mobile.
Also try a search for ‘where is Brighton?’ and you get some wiki type info above the search results which answers the question perfectly.
So not perfect but maybe not quite as bad as you make out…
Where art thou would be a saa-weet slogan!
It is obvious that msft had spent hell of a time in scrolling up and down at goog. you can see that at both web and m version of bing
That was right right thing to do because they as you say “blessed the internet with its new search engine” by copying little bit and making it even little better.
Very nice to see msft that doesn’t suck once in a while.
Just tried m.bing.com on my iPhone… was not bad!
msft copying everthing from google.
I don’t see how the search is similar to Google at all. I used it for travel – Bing on my laptop – and got a great deal. I will still go to Google for some stuff – but others I would go to Bing. I like how the results bring up the actions up front and we even get to see a blurb of content for pages listed on the search results.
Not bad at all…personally, I’m getting better results on my mobile than Goog IMO
The good thing about it is that I get what I search for, not millions of results. Works great, even on my blackberry curve.
bing, hotmail, twitter, flickr all these sites can’t be visited in China now…
Why cant be visited? For mobile only or mobile and pc?
nice
It’s called competition boys. And it’s about time.
We all benefit from competition. What? Don’t think Google can handle it.
We will see. Innovate or die!
Just so you know, this is the same as the previous Windows Live Mobile. They’ve only re-branded it as Bing. I’m sure functional upgrades are coming though.
Microsoft isn’t pulling any punches… Today they released their very own “BINGTones” for your mobile phone… 3 Ring Tones in total – http://www.groovypost.com/howto/groovyblog/how-to-get-free-bingtones-from-microsoftcom/
Excellent article and informative article.
I tried to download the map service to my Storm and it downloaded it, but I can’t find it. Any thoughts??
I Agree nothing is better then the delicious google.
We are spoiled .
Nice article : ]
I still like google.