Is Bing that Big?

Microsoft has long been striving to be someone in the search engines landscape. Unfortunately, they have never achieved it. But on May of 2009, Microsoft stroke again. They released Bing, a new search engine with over 100 millions budget which should be enough to make it a great competitor on the market. So we’ve put it at a test. Is Bing that Big? What does it have to offer? Is it worth using it for searching biomedical literature?

Is Bing that big? This is what we’ve wondered after it’s been released and all the discussions there have been around. As we are concerned by delivering useful resources for the life sciences professionals, we decided to put Bing a test for biomedical research.

What biomedical information this search engine can give you? We started with a very basic search on Breast Cancer. First of all, the amount of results is huge. No less than 50.300.000 results for this mere search. Mainly because there are so many results, you have to get used to it before you can analyze where to find the information you need to read. Obviously the main results, the ones you are used to have in every search engine are displayed in the center, below the search box and premium advertising. There is one thing that is funny with Bing, they didn’t beat around the bush and put the information in the same way as google does (blue titles, black text and green URLs). Who knows, they could be right after all.

Once you are used to the layout of the page you can start analyzing how is the information clustered the way we show it to you below.

1. Features the main search result meant to be the most relevant. This result often mentions the Wikipedia result as google does.
2. When available, Bing displays a set of related informations to the query you’ve typed in, like Articles, Symptoms, Treatment, Stages, Surgery, Prevention and Reference. This is an interesting feature but unfortunately it does work only for really general queries such as Breast Cancer. Try Breast Carcinoma (synonym of breast cancer) and you won’t get any related information in that way.
3. Displays relevant Related searches to the current search. Don’t expect to have anything very specific though, the related searches are general. That is to say, the last 2 related searches suggest Lung and Prostate Cancer.The same search in novoseek would allow you to refine it with more specific breast cancer-related filters such as invasive breast cancer, brca2 mutation or contralateral breast cancer…
   
4. Search history. Nice functionality and very simple to use. You can turn it off whenever you want or just go to your search history and clear some of them, if you need to.

Now let’s keep reviewing Bing a bit more. As you scroll down the results you see the information clustered in the categories we mentioned before. If you click on them, you will have the whole set of results in that field. This is an interesting feature but unfortunately it is hardly working.

One of the interesting thing that Bing is doing is the preview of results as shown in the image below. It will help you read more of the article without having to click on it. It is not yet revolutionary but still it is interesting to consider as an additional function.



After this sample search, it seems clear that we are not dealing with the same amount of information and ways of treating it as would a biomedical search engine would do. To be true, BING does not propose much compared to Google but it still has this brand-new-product effect. The technology is not yet an outstanding one. What is true is that the results are pretty similar to Google or Yahoo. So Bing may not be that big but it could compete with Yahoo who is still late in bringing innovation on the market.

Last but not least. How hard for Microsoft Bing to realize that when they are just launching their product, Google is giving a preview of Google Wave (web of the future?) and announces the beta release of Google Squared, another way of searching the web. It seems that whatever competitors do, Google is always a step ahead.

We recommend you to read:

• A user case inspired by Flash Forward and a poll
• 7 on average: a story about synonyms in biomedical concepts
• How difficult is it to change?
• Judgmental heuristics
• Use case: Is Low Vitamin D Levels Associated With Greater Risk of Relapse in Childhood Multiple Sclerosis?