I recently wrote a couple of articles about various features within Google’s search engine (here & here) and then realised that other search engines are available – not least because my current browser of choice, at least on my MacBook is Edge which defaults to Microsoft Bing for search.
So, in the interests of fairness I’ll cover off some of the same ground for Bing as well.
Narrowing The Search
As you’d expect there are a lot of similarities between the two search engines and this is really clear in the methods for narrowing down a search.
If you enter free text it will try and match all words. If you put a phrase in “” it will ensure that all of them are in the search results and you can use – to remove words. You can also use old school operators such as AND, OR and NOT to achieve the same results if that is your thing.
Similarly you, if you want to search for terms on a specific site you can use the domain: tag, for example
domain:autotrader.co.uk e-class
returns the Auto Trader Mercedes e-class page as top result.
Another familiar one is the filetype: tag which as with Google will return documents of the specified filetype as the top result.
An interesting variation on a theme is the contains: tag which instead of returning direct files of a given type it looks at pages that contain links to those files which is a useful way of expanding a search back out if the filetype: tag doesn’t find what you need.
Another interesting variation is that Bing uses the tag site: differently to Google. Google site: is equivalent more or less to domain:. In Bing what site: does is only return pages from the given domain, so if you knew something was on a particular site but couldn’t find the specific item them site: could help. For example:
site:itspire.co.uk
Returns all the pages Bing has indexed for the site. Of course if you use it along with search terms it has a similar result as domain:.
As far as I can tell there isn’t a simple page bringing all the advanced elements together unlike with Google but other than that they are very must alike.
Calculation and Conversion
Here things get really deja vu like.
As before, you want to do a quick calculation just enter it into the Bing bar and the answer will appear in a calculator app right in the browser and just like Google this has other functions found on a standard desk calculator.
Similarly the power function ^ and square root function sort work exactly as you’d expect.
For conversions the process is also very similar. Type the desired conversion into the Bing bar and you get the answer in a simple app that allows you to adjust units in and out.
As with Google there are a lot of different options although there are some differences between the two. At time of writing the available types are:
- Length
- Mass
- Temperature
- Speed
- Volume
- Area
- Time
- Frequency
- Angle
- Force
- Pressure
- Energy
- Power
- Electric Current
- Voltage
- Resistance
- Digital Storage
- Fuel Consumption
