The Dingo Times

Microsoft just announced a Bing refresh for touch phones, including support for iPhone.  According to the announcement, the new mobile bing brings some great new features including Movie listings, NFL player stats, and flight stats.

I didn’t try any of those: I tried the single most important thing a mobile search must provide: directions.

Home Page

The styling is a bit meh, but the brunt of the criticism is on the actual “touch” usability.

There are three things they really got wrong:

• Can’t get location from iPhone GPS.  Google’s mobile search, which is also a website running within Safari, can query my iPhone for it’s current location.
• Bing logo doesn’t link to home page.  Instead, you have text links at the bottom which are a bit too small to touch effectively.  One starts to think this was really built for a stylus.  The comical thing is that the logo is on every screen, is a nice, fat link target, and they never thought of using it.
• Delete key. After filling in a search query, an X gets placed to the left of the search icon.  Better tap carefully, otherwise all the text you just typed will be wiped out.

Directions

Since bing didn’t know my location, it prompted for a start.  I applaud Microsoft for fighting the urge to put a Windows logo next to “start”, but at least they finally realize they need to build a fresh brand for Search.

I wanted to go from Faniuel Hall to Redbones in Somerville; two well known local locations.  Notice the “X” adjacent to the Search.  I can’t possibly figure out why someone didn’t insist on putting the search button beneath the text area.

After carefully pressing the search button, I was brought to the “end” screen to type in my ending location.  Note that I misspelled Somerville.  I didn’t bother to correct it, since search engines know I’m a bad typer.

And, here we see the results.  404.

Google Check

Here’s the same misspelled query in the iPhone’s Map client, which sends its queries straight to the Googleplex:

Instant results.  In addition to the directions, I get realtime traffic.

Back to bing, and we type in the correct spelling.  Still, no dice.

So, I went back to bing’s web search, and typed the same misspelled destination, and I get results:

What’s this mean?

Looks like their directions aren’t plugged into their search engine.