The moment you start accessing the website bing.com using your mobile phones you will be directed to m.bing.com which is the mobile interface. The very first screen would ask you to enter your location because based on this you can get a lot more customized services. I was asked with a small submission box to enter the city name.
Once my City name was entered – ‘Hyderabad’, there i was given access to some links like City Name followed by options like Near City Name, State Name which means that i can even search locations which are nearby to my location. Next there is a Map of the City which you entered in your location powered by ‘Microsoft Virtual Earth’.
I had to save the location under Home, work or other to make sure i dont have to keep entering my location whenever i visit the mobile bing version. There is also a option to ‘Optimize web results for your phone’ under search settings which needs to be set as ON.
Next when i went for a Location Search on Bing where in you need to Enter two locations from Start to End and then you get all the location details via Map or else in the Text format which is quite good because it helps you with the right locations given in detail. The location search gave me roads information along with the rights & left i need to make while driving in this route. There were even a option to show a Map for this selected location search which had pointers for all the text based route help they had provided. This thing has really been helpful to me because the Google Maps dont provide you with the location names and the lefts or rights you need to drive when you want to reach certain destination, but Bing search is just awesome in this case.
On the Mobile Search menu there was a link called ‘Movies’ which was originally meant for finding all the latest movies running at your location theaters and when i did a search for my location, i was amazed to find some unrelated search results instead of the right movie names or theater names. Seems like this section still needs to be updated with the localized results.
The other Web Results, Image Results & News Results were all the normal ones nicely displayed on my large mobile screen with not many changes. I was using both my Airtel mobile office paid internet connection & Wifi Internet while writing this article and at both the connections the speed of bing search was very quick with all the pages optimized for the iphone and i didn’t find anything broken overall. Though most of the times the searches were redirected to the Indian version.
Is it a GPS built-in Bing???
i think that Bing is not as good as Google. Google would still index new websites faster than Bing. Microsoft would still need a lot of catching to do with GoogleBot.
I use both Bing and Google search engine and i dont see much difference in their search results. I use google for searching hard to find academic topics and Bing for general search.