Partial Bing launch a damp squib

Microsoft’s new search tool Bing is up and running a couple of days ahead of schedule. But it looks suspiciously like it isn’t finished yet.

While bing.com is accessible, many of the billed features aren’t in place yet. There’s no sign of the contextual categories which are supposed to appear with results; instead there are the simple Images/News/Video/etc tabs, which are already familiar from Google. At the moment, the site appears somewhere between the old Live Search (which a new title) and a Google clone. There’s nothing of any importance that’s new to the world of search.

Given that several features from previous screenshots are missing, the most likely explanation is that the version of Bing currently online is incomplete – and to be fair, it is labeled ‘beta’ at the moment.

If this is the case, the argument by Gartner’s Allen Weiner that Microsoft had blundered by leaving six days between official unveiling and public launch appears even more valid. Letting the public, and the media, get their hands on Bing without the new concepts in place completely undermines what impact it will have. Anyone using it today will simply conclude that it’s a Google knock-off which may or may not offering better results in its main list. And that alone won’t make many people change their habits.

One new (for Microsoft) feature in Bing is the shopping section, which includes listings, directories and user reviews. However, this is hardly revolutionary as it’s openly nothing more than the Ciao comparison site under a Bing banner. Hopefully Microsoft will be adding other sources of shopping information later on, otherwise there is no real point in visiting Bing for a shopping-related search.

Meanwhile several commentators have taken a dig at the fact that, as long as users have the safe search option switched off (which is a simple task for people of any age), you can find links to sexually explicit clips. The same is true of Google’s Video Search, though on that site the results are links to external sites. With Bing, some (but not all) explicit clips can be played directly on the site, which may not amuse family-friendly advertisers.

It’s also notable that Bing allows you to play clips from YouTube. While it’s simply a case of embedding clips, which many sites do, it doesn’t seem likely that Google will be too happy about this type of use, particularly if and when Bing puts adverts on the video results pages.

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