Have you seen the commercials for Bing’s new Farecast Technology feature? I liked the new look of the new MSN search when Bing was released by Microsoft. However, even though the search results are more organized , half of my search queries are images. Bing has not been able to match up to the abundance of Google’s image search. I have slowly started to creep back to Google, using it as my backup for Bing. Last night I saw a commercial for Bing’s new Farecast feature and I must admit it caught my attention. It’s a very “Microsoft” idea but in a good way. It’s a feature that is allowing Bing to live up to their catch phrase “It’s the first decision making search engine”. I think they might have something here. What exactly is Farecast and how does it benefit our search?
Farecast is a travel feature that predicts when a good time to purchase your airline tickets will be. Bing takes its search engine power and scans multiple travel sites at once giving you access to more than one hundred travel sites, allowing you to see results in one place. This beats having to individually go to Travelocity, Orbitz, CheapTickets, etc. This would be most beneficial to people that are constantly booking flights either for themselves or their boss.
While on Farecast, there is a 7-Day price predictor that shows up on the interface as well as rate indicators advising if a certain price is a good deal. The notification is clear and tells you whether you should wait or buy, and even predicts how many dollars the price of the ticket will drop. Not too sure what to believe? Bing also tells you how confident their prediction is allowing you to make the decision to either take their word for it or decide to do to book it anyway. Who doesn’t like to get a great price on an airline ticket? Once you have decided to book your trip, narrow down your option by price, times, and other preferences then buy directly from a supplier or agency.
How will this new feature affect the way you search? I’m not sure if it will sway me into using Bing over Google for some search queries but I will definitely use Bing when I travel. Bing has picked up momentum upon their release but Google still controls a very large piece of the search engine market share. This new feature will help set them apart and they must continue with these improvements to show their versatility versus Google. The world does not need another Google; there is truth to Bing’s commercials on search overload. We need the ability of decision making search organization of Bing. And, oh, by the way, the latest data shows that Bing picked up another 1% market share last month.
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One Comment
I've tried to search for a few deals after getting excited about Farecast in this article, and was a bit bumed to see it US-centricness. I'm searching from Germany, but was surprised to see all sorts of "best-deals" in Las Vegas, Chicago etc. I'm actually looking for deals in Athens, Venice, Vienna, Berlin etc. However, on the top right corner, Bing does note that I am in "Germany", so they have definitely positioned me right, alas the search results are not relevant though.