Microsoft makes Bing a far better video search engine than Google
It might be difficult to beat Google’s YouTube as the undoubted champion of online video searches, but Microsoft has just made a compelling case for visiting Bing before you watch anything on YouTube. Microsoft executed the finishing touches of its Bing video search feature just this week, and we have to say that the final product looks flawless.
According to the information, it features larger, easier-to-identify video thumbnails, and you can even preview videos straight from the results to get an idea of what you’re looking at. Just drift your cursor over a result to watch a small bit of the video.
Bing now shows extra information on each result to bring it up to same level with YouTube. Specially, you can now see the view count, upload date, and uploader before clicking through to the result.
When you search for a song, an enlarged thumbnail image will be shown, or “artist”, for that song. The artist is chosen based on the top result and relevance to your search. Watching a video for any of those other songs is just a click away. The artist’s video will play in place or you can click through to the source of the video to watch it there.
That new feature is just one of a few changes that focus on music videos. Searches for songs will now highlight the “best” result with an extra-large preview. These results are chosen based on relevance and popularity. And you can watch the entire video straight from the search result if you so please.
All of the related searches have been moved in a row with your original search, so as you scroll through the page you’ll have some ideas of what to search for the next to help improve your search results. When you hit the bottom of the page, you’ll get even more suggestions and the option to see more video search results. These updates develop touch-friendliness and balance better to tablets and other smaller screens.
Maybe the biggest change out of all of them happens to be grabbing results from places not featuring the YouTube URL. While Google’s own video search tool on google.com delivers a successful number of results from multiple sources. But that product is out-dated and lacks many of the features introduced by Bing’s latest update.
