Testing Bing, Part 2: The Features – Video Search

Bing and Google both have video search, too. They both work:

But again, Bing outdoes Google. Bing presents a beautiful – and useful – grid view of search results (or, if you prefer, you can switch to a details view). Google has a weird mix of search results, video preview, related videos, options, and more. It doesn’t work very well. And perhaps most importantly, you can only see a third as many of your results at a time as in Bing. And isn’t that why you came here?

Bing has a great video preview mode, where you can see the video play (with sound!) as you hold your mouse over it. This has proved controversial since it lets people see porn, but I don’t understand why. Bing filters these results by default, and both Google and Bing let you see thumbnails if you choose to un-filter these results. Why is a static thumbnail of a boob okay, but an animated one isn’t? Whatever. Apparently, Microsoft has fixed this somehow, anyway. What really matters is that this is a very friendly, useful way of offering video preview.

The page you get when you click a video to watch it is much better, too:

Depending on where you click, Google will either load the video into the annoyingly small preview pane, or will take you to it’s player screen. Due to a bunch of information most people won’t care about by the time they’re watching the video, the actual player itself is somewhat cramped. Bing very rightly puts the focus on the video itself, orienting the page to allow for widescreen video in a nice big player. Thank you!

The verdict: Bing wins again. Come on, Google, quit letting your programmers design your UI.