The launch of Bing, Microsoft’s new ‘decision engine’ (which is essentially a rebranded Live Search) was talked about as the search engine to rival Google. But it seems there’s more hype than substance. Much of what has been done is take a concept that already works, made little tweaks to ‘improve’ it and then shout about it from the rooftops.

Some features have been used by Microsoft as Bing’s USPs, but none of these appear to be new or foolproof:

Categorisation – Bing is able to categorise your results into web groups such as images, facts, quotes, etc and display these sections within your results and in the LHS menu. But there are only a few industries where this has been implemented and the category headings are easy to miss. These web groups are intended to help the user in their need to drill down but most people will search in more depth using their own words, especially when they find out that this clustering is really just another version of the related search suggestions which are also on the page.

Instant answers – apparently Bing is a mix of Google (search) and Wolfram Alpha (decision engine) in that it will serve you links but should also be able to answer your query on the page in some circumstances. Again, great in theory but sadly lacking in accuracy at the moment.

Prime Minister search on bing.com

Prime minister of England results are ok – the information up front followed by some useful links. But how up to date is the information? Let’s try a forumla 1 search…

Who won Forumla 1 on bing.com

This might be a true fact from 2007, but what about the 2008 winner? Or the F1 winner from this weekend?

Scrolling image search – if you’re looking for images on the web, Bing’s ability to carry on scrolling down the page seemed like a great idea. No more waiting for the page to reload as you go from page 1 to page 2 and onwards. However, users quite often find an image they like but carry on looking to see if they can find a better one. On Google you can go back to page 11 and retrieve your image, with Bing, the reduced scrollbar and lack of numbering means a user has no idea where to go back to in order to find that image.

Hovering page snippets – one feature which could do well is the hovering page snippets.

Hover-over page snippets on bing.com

Bing takes more content from the landing page and delivers it in a hover-over next to each result. This gives the site owner the potential to get more information into the results rather than just the meta description. However, the hover-over only appears when the user’s mouse gets near to the RHS of the listing, so it will be interesting to see how popular this is with searchers ie how many people actually find it and use it. It definitely highlights the importance of an inticing first paragraph on every page though.

There are more features such as the travel search within the results, search history (also available with Google), shopping search and the changing background image (not a hugely important USP), but I have serious doubts that any are big enough to cause a stampede of users away from Google.

Well…except maybe the heavily reported video autoplay feature on Bing. This is apparently proving very popular with people looking for sites they might not want to appear in their browser history…

Google has teamed up with major social networking sites to fight the Facebook juggernaut. They are working on an initiative to provide an open, standards-based approach to social networking … OpenSocial.

TechCrunch reports…

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

We are about to build a couple of Facebook applications for a new client, so may well need to investigate OpenSocial as it becomes available. Watch this space.

If you’re a Facebook user, you’ll want to be aware that soon they will be opening up your profile to Google search. The BBC reports …

The default setting is that you will be made available to Google and the like, unless you opt out. Of course, this raises privacy concerns…and I’m sure will cause a number of Facebook users to question how much of their information is freely available.

If you want to opt-out of being publicly searchable, you’ll find a tick-box in the Search Privacy settings of your Facebook account - as shown below.