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Bing: The “Old New Thing” *

Jun 21, 2009 6:55 am by Kip Kniskern | 4 comments

Another day, and another A-List blogger “discovers” the “launch” of a Bing feature, which of course has been in Live Search for ages. This time it’s Jason Calacanis, who posted news of the “launch” of XRank on Twitter, which has been receiving a number of ReTweets and some comments on Jason’s Friendfeed page:

Now of course getting discovered by the big boys isn’t such a bad thing, as then all the other big boys pile on:

(to be fair, TechCrunch didn’t call xRank new, and we agree xRank is better than Google Trends, but still, they did pile on ;) )

Noticing xRank wasn’t the first bit of “old news”, of course. Right at Bing’s launch, MG Siegler and Loic LeMuir discovered video highlights:

This is just too good. One of the features of Microsoft’s just launched Bing search engine is that it auto-plays videos in results when you hover over them.

This caused quite the little tempest, as you may remember, and caused Bing, to its credit, to make some changes in how it handles explicit search results.

and a slew of users were amazed by scrolling image search.

Of course none of these features are new to Bing, they’ve been in Live Search all along, which only goes to show that 1) no one paid Live Search ANY attention (or they would have discovered these features long ago), and 2) the nice shiny new brand has been having an impact. Of course we’re all for more people discovering good things about Bing, even if they have been around for a while.

And speaking of old new stuff in Bing, it looks like we’ll be getting a Bing branded Windows Mobile client sooner rather than later:

Thanks for the tease, Stefan!

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http://msftandthefuture.spaces.live.com/ Quikboy
I’m just been laughing when people have discovered these ‘new’ features. It’s been on Live Search for so long, and I thought people tried Live Search, and didn’t like it, despite some of its interesting features like these. This just shows that people can be such twits, and not even try something out fully, unless it has some stupid name, a different look, and whatever. I still don’t like the Bing name or the look, but it’s working.
http://www.liveside.net/members/lord_5F00_canti86/default.aspx lord_canti86
This is right up there with the discovery of “new” features like image search scrolling and video thumbnail playback. Pricelesss
http://www.liveside.net/members/surilamin/default.aspx surilamin
Kudos to you Kip for calling out these ‘bloggers.’ I saw the tweet from Calacanis and then the article on techcrunch late last night and was like wtf are they talking about, these features were in Live for some time. Oh well, it just goes to show how much of an impact a change of name can have…
http://www.liveside.net/members/tophtucker/default.aspx tophtucker
When people ask me what I think of this radical new search engine they’ve just heard of, I can’t decide whether to reveal that very little of it is new (and thereby risk deterring people from checking it out).
The power of a brand. It’s remarkable. And a little sad. But oh well.