Summary

Bing’s new visual search is a great example of the RIA (Rich Internet Application) potential of the search engine world, but is still falls short of being something exponentially exciting.  Yes – I’m sure new features are coming to Bing, but when?  With all the resources that Microsoft can bring to focus on a solution, what is the hold up?

Analysis

Microsoft Bing’s new visual search feature does a good job of illustrating the RIA (Rich Internet Application) abilities of web 2.0 style interfaces.  But revolutionary?  Not quite.  While unique in it's own right, and miles ahead of competitors like Google and Yahoo!, similar features have been in use for over 18 months by NeXplore (NASDAQ: NXPC, www.nexplore.com) and others.  The fanfare and publicity Microsoft craves will certainly follow, and a host of users will look at what Bing brings to the party and say “watch out Google”, but in reality this is too little to get excited about at this point.  There are better solutions out there already.

 
The list of search engine ‘wanna be’s’ is a mile long.  Traditional sites of long standing such as Alta Vista, GigaBlast, Ask, and Momma all focus on a sparse search page interface, and really deliver nothing more than just the typical 10-15 lines of blue hyperlinks to potential sites of interest.  Ho hum.  Then there are a precious few search sites who really grab the idea of user interface design, presentation, and organization of information.  NeXplore (www.nexplore.com) quickly comes to mind, along with wolframalpha (www.wolframalpha.com), which both support a far more graphical user interface, a quick and accurate search engine, plus a host of other features that I can only assume Microsoft is just now beginning to diagram on a whiteboard in a remote cubicle office in Redmond.

The target is simple.   The smaller, more nimble and more visionary NeXplore interface is far superior to anything on the net, offering features that Bing and Google still don’t fathom like website thumbnails, common and similar phrases to the current search, Wiki-related information, multimedia “hover ads”, live contact connections via voice, email, and web chat, plus a host of other features that still win my award for “best user interface”.

While it’s nice to see Microsoft Bing realize the potential for doing it another way, and trying to separate from the pack, the  interface design team in Dallas is still months and miles ahead.

Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.