Last night, Microsoft’s Bing got a major overhaul that added more entertainment features to the company’s search engine. Bing now makes it easier to find song lyrics, TV shows with online video, as well as information about movies and movie times. Bing now also allows users to preview songs via Microsoft’s Zune service. The implementation of this – with the songs and preview buttons at the top of the search results – looks almost exactly like Google’s Music Search. In addition to these search-oriented features, Microsoft also partnered with a number of developers to offer about 100 popular casual games directly on Bing.
Music: Lyrics Search and Full Music Preview
As Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s Director of Bing, told us earlier this year when we got to see a sneak preview of some of these new features, lyrics are an extremely popular search category, yet a lot of lyrics sites are rather shady and the right lyrics are often hard to find.
According to Microsoft, about 70% of people online look for lyrics at one time or another. Now, whenever you search for a song that is in Microsoft’s Zune library, Bing gives you the option to also see the lyrics to this song. The presentation is very basic – with the lyrics on a plain white background – but infinitely better than what you would find on most lyrics sites on the Web today.
As you search for songs, Bing’s new music preview feature also allows you to play every single song in the Zune catalog once (after the first play, you will only get a 30 second preview). Songs can be bought from Microsoft’s own Zune music service, iTunes and Amazon.
Bing Games
Bing now hosts over 100 popular casual games that users can play directly in the search engine. In addition, just like lyrics searches often lead to some of the darker parts of the Internet, searches for game walkthroughs and cheats also often end up on rather sketchy sites. The Bing team now aggregates this information, as well as reviews and videos, from trustworthy sites.
TV Shows and Movies
While this isn’t a comprehensive “TV Guide for the Internet” like Clicker and its competitors, Bing now also links directly to full-length episodes of popular TV shows. Microsoft indexes about 1,500 shows for this service. For those who still watch “real” TV, Bing also now presents guide information for these shows.
For movies, the search engine now displays movie times, reviews, as well as real time sentiment analysis about the movie from Twitter and Facebook. In addition, Bing adds information about restaurants near the movie theater and parking information from Bing Maps.
One Search Domain at a Time
It is clear that Bing is trying to find all the top search domains (travel and shopping were one of Bing’s first strengths there) and then cover them as best it can by bringing together the best information sources right in the search engine. While Google is also working on similar initiatives, the company still focuses mostly on taking users to other sites. Bing, on the other hand, is squarely focused on providing users with the answers they are looking for right on its own property (though Microsoft, of course, also still presents plenty of links).
