By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
We’ve known that Microsoft still has work remaining in its itinerary to build Bing into a more competitive search engine — we knew at launch time that not every feature would compete on an absolute par against Google. If it did, then MSN and Windows Live would have been far more popular. But when Microsoft steps forward to say, “Now, we really have something competitive in this department,” it’s difficult to give Bing the same number of “Mulligans” as we did at the beginning.
This morning, Microsoft rolled out some replacements to its old MSN Video search engine — which had remained online all this time — to produce Bing Video. Like Google Video and unlike YouTube, Bing Video is not a host; it’s a search service for publicly accessible videos. So YouTube videos, although hosted by Google, should appear on Bing as well. The differentiator here, theoretically, should not be inventory, since both services should have access to the same material. Instead, it should be how the material is presented, and whether the search process provides access to not only what the user is looking for, but material that may also be pertinent, relevant, and interesting.
So this Betanews comparison does not pit Bing against YouTube — let’s be clear about that. This compares Bing Video against Google Video, similar to our initial test of the two services last June.
With today being Veterans’ Day in the US, I decided to devote our search themes for this contest to the bigger, braver battles that Americans have fought in the interests of our freedom and prosperity, so that we’re able to spend time dealing in more mundane things like browsing through videos. I began with an easy search for “D-Day” footage — I want to see if I can locate the small amount of actual footage shot of the Allies storming the Normandy beaches.
What’s D-Day to some of us who appreciate the extreme sacrifices of the Allies in saving the world, isn’t D-Day to everyone, apparently. Since search engines trust the titles of videos to be truthful about their contents, 6 of the first 20 results returned by Bing actually showed amateur video of paintball competitions called “D-Day,” and one was a stop-motion animation using plastic soldiers attacking a beach fortification made of Styrofoam.
By comparison, the first 15 items returned by Google were of legitimate historical D-Day footage, while #16 was the same silly Styrofoam recreation. (The title does say “D-Day Lost Combat Reels,” but the word “stop-motion” might also give other clues.) In all, 17 of the top 20 videos Google returned contained D-Day footage, while one contained recent footage of the D-Day Memorial in Normandy.
You’d think adding material to the search would narrow things down significantly — for example, making the query “D-Day” footage Normandy invasion. And for Google Video, it does, with the first 45 items retrieved showing authentic Normandy footage. Only item #46 in Google’s retrieval shows footage from paintball competitors (even though “Normandy” is nowhere close to “Oklahoma”). Item #12 for Bing Video involves paintball, while #11 shows footage of a legitimate amateur D-Day recreation in Ohio (again, nowhere close to Normandy).
In browsing through selected videos, Bing continues to show one of its bright spots: the ability to play a segment of the video directly within the thumbnail, complete with sound, before the user actually selects it. This gives the user more of an opportunity to see whether this is actually something she really wants to be seeing. Google Video currently has no counterpart to this, and it really should, although one wonders whether Google’s looking for an opportunity to roll the feature out when no one is noticing.
This is especially useful for previewing videos hosted by other sites, especially universities, where embedding isn’t normally supported. For example, when we tried a search for the classic 1952 Edward R. Murrow See It Now documentary on “Christmas in Korea” (the query here being Korea Murrow “See It Now”), most of the sites with the longest relevant clips (some of them including the Korea show, some not) are on a non-embedding site, such as Kansas University’s Journalism Dept. Pulling up the whole video would mean leaving the search engine.
However, a video’s thumbnail alone doesn’t often tell you whether it might contain a minute or two from the edition featuring Murrow’s tour with US troops in the Korean War. So Bing’s ability to preview even non-embeddable videos here is extremely helpful; with only a thumbnail to go on, the only way for you to test a video pulled up by Google is to travel off-site.
Next: Presentation is the key…
Once you’ve selected a video from a site that supports video embedding (so that you don’t leave the context of the search engine), Bing is capable of displaying it in a more pleasing frame than Google. A dark grey viewing region, coupled with light grey text on dark for the description, is much easier on the eyes than Google’s layout, which essentially hands over a pre-annexed rectangle to whatever service is providing the feed (YouTube, DailyMotion, MySpace, etc.).
Google Video does add an extra space below the playback region, for “Related Videos.” Now, you’d think that your other query results would be full of related videos; but there’s a good reason why these are here: A pre-catalogued index placed these items here, as belonging to the same general category as the video being viewed.
That’s an important feature that Bing Video lacks, although the “More from the Web” section does present more items from the query in a more optimized layout: two rows of five each, rather than one long column of ten like Google.
Bing Video would still benefit from stepping aside even further, however, from its former role as a YouTube competitor. Like Google Video, Bing Video should realize that the user of a search engine isn’t really a browser, or a “person who browses” — he’s someone who’s looking for something specific. So showing “Recently Commented Videos” and “Most Watched” videos on unrelated topics to the search at hand, is not a help but a hindrance in this context. When I care about D-Day, I don’t care about Lady Gaga. (Frankly, I don’t care about Lady Gaga at any other time either, but that’s beside the point.)
Another feature Bing Video could stand to lose is “Up Next,” a holdover from the MSN days. Here, the service has pre-selected a queue of videos for you to watch — not videos pertaining to your search, just something it happened to pull up. In our case with D-Day, Bing Video (or rather, MSN) pulled up an interview with the star of Fox Television’s “Glee,” and an award ceremony interview with Oprah Winfrey’s friend Gayle.
If Bing is supposed to be a “decision engine,” as Microsoft’s ads put it, then there is no reason for these videos to be here unless they pertain to the search at hand. This is no longer MSN Video, the place to go when you have no place to go and you want the Web to take you somewhere — the Internet equivalent of Sominex. Bing Video is a tool, and should be treated like one. For more on that subject, I would recommend that Bing’s people pay a visit to Bob Muglia at the Tools division of Microsoft.
The verdict
Last June, in our initial test just after Bing’s premiere, I gave a very slight edge to Bing Video over Google Video for presenting more sensible results. But I issued a warning to Bing about adopting strange, Microsoft-ian patchwork features like adding wild terms like adlt=strict to the end of queries to guarantee explicit content filters work. There shouldn’t have to be “guarantees;” the feature should either work or not. However, Google, in a never-ending race not to be outdone even with questionable features, has since added a similar feature to Google Video.
The qualitative distance between the two video search engines remains very slight. In some cases — like with the query “Civil War” Appomattox re-enactment — the search results were essentially identical, just shuffled around a bit. However, for the most part, it does not appear as though Google has devoted as much effort into improving not only the video search process, but also the presentation, as Microsoft with Bing Video.
Now, those frivolous and unnecessary holdover features from the dark ages of MSN, such as “Up Next,” can be let go anytime. But being able to preview videos as videos is a very compelling feature that still tips the scales toward Bing for now. For Google Video to catch up, it needs to add this feature, and it needs to rearrange the layout of its search results to something more functional. That’s something that can happen tomorrow.
But that’s the thing with Google these days, isn’t it: These things can happen tomorrow, and they don’t. You never know with Google when something will get back on-track, or fall back off the track. That uncertainty may be Microsoft’s key to maintaining the edge in this and other key departments for Bing, and reclaiming search share one bite at a time.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
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