Finding time while working on the internet is always a big plus, isn’t it? And one of the most frequently used tools on the net is the search function.
In that venue, Google has long ruled the roost. This past spring Microsoft introduced Bing and suddenly it appeared that there was some healthy competition in the search engine world. (Yahoo is also in the mix, but today we’re going to focus on Google and Bing.)
Here is a visual tour (posted originally on the PC World site) of what’s new in Bing. This is a helpful slide show of the features that Bing brings to users, among them, the Explorer Pane:
A key element of Bing’s new look is a left-hand navigation menu called the Explorer Pane. This extra column of content includes Quick Tabs that break searches down into Web Groups relevant to your search. A search for “Chicago” automatically generates related categories that Bing predicts you’re looking for. Quite different Explorer Pane categories are generated by a search for “type 2 diabetes”–for example, ‘Articles’, ‘Symptoms’, and ‘Diet’.
Search engines are so embedded in our experience of the on-line world that we sometimes hardly notice them. But the competition for traffic is fierce and improvements in just increments of seconds, when it comes to search speed, can make a huge difference over time.
So, in response to Bing, Google has made some tweaks in its search features which enable users to refine their results and, hopefully, get to the information they want more quickly. Google introduced its left-hand search panel at around the same time that Bing did. It has now added some exciting new innovations which should help save even more time when searching:
The new Google search options (you have to click on show options at the top of the search results to open the pane) provide even more compelling efficiency though. Google already included a number of options when they rolled the functionality out in May. Last week they added the ability to filter by Books. This week they have continued to tweak the search options functionality, most notably the ability to tweak results by timeframe or view results only from the past hour.
Google or Bing? Which is it for you? Have you explored both? Please feel invited to drop me a line – I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions!
What if you could find another hour every day? You can! You are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!
Let’s explore time together …
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