Search Tool Functionality Changing
Bing Videos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am growing increasingly frustrated with the old school search tools we have to use every day.
Not because the tools we have available to us right now suck so bad, but rather because I have a feeling we are on the cusp of a pretty shift in the search experience of the average user.
There are some pretty cool tools coming out lately that offer the first hints of the new experience that is coming our way. Check these out if you haven’t already done so.
Google Now
I’ve been playing with the Google Now app on my iPhone for about a week, and think it is really a kick ass product. The app is Google’s play at creating a challenge to Siri, and other hands free search tools. I still use an iPhone 4, and haven’t used Siri, so maybe my perspective is that of a tech luddite, but I dig Google Now.
It’s not the hands free part I like, as much as the way the app collects information that is useful to you and brings it together in one place in a way that makes it easy to use. As someone who spends a lot of professional time doing Internet research, I’ve always been a big fan of tools that aggregate information. Google Now provides a nice iPhone interface that does this in a way that I can use quickly, so I’m a fan. It will be interesting to see where it goes in future iterations. Here’s a good tech review of Google Now functionality.
Bing Video Preview
I have never utilized Bing as my primary search resource, but use it often as a secondary tool. One of the things to like about Bing is that it typically offers better visual/graphical search views than Google. Recently, they’ve started a nice piece of functionality for previewing videos that I find to be a nice time saver. It’s a nice little time saver and works like this:
Finding the right video content can be extremely frustrating and that a single frame cannot tell the whole story. The new video experience in Bing includes a video preview feature that shows a short sample of the full video clip, including audio if available.
Bing’s video preview is activated whenever you hover over a thumbnail. Search for Sydney dust storm then hover over the thumbnails that look most interesting to see a preview.
Take a look!
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