On May 29th Microsoft launched Bing its new decision engine with much fanfare (they are pumping in more than 80M $ for adverts on Bing!), and there have been some pretty good reviews about it. But one more important update from Microsoft that got buried in all the hoopla was the fact that it has now decided to bundle the new IE8 with search and webslices from OneRiot, the popular social search engine which indexes in real time. This is the one of the first attempts from Microsoft to keep up with the race of being real time in the current web.
What is OneRiot?
In short, OneRiot aims to be the perfect social search engine that updates in real time from the popular social media services like Twitter, Digg etc. This method might prove to be more accurate when it comes to finding current events. This is because by digging, re-tweeting or sharing links to web pages, people are signaling that the content on those pages is relevant to them right now. OneRiot takes those trends, indexes the web page in the trending link and gives you that information.
OneRiot search results are indexed based on an algorithm that weighs a total of 26 factors in the link (Diggs, Retweets, bookmarks etc.) as well as the authority of the sharer, among other factors. OneRiot results are believed to be highly recent and relevant in comparison.
What’s in the package?
They are also offering a real time add-ons package that includes the OneRiot products whereas the new special version of IE8 comes loaded with OneRiot stuff which put the real time web directly into the browser. The real time add-ons package includes OneRiot’s real-time search results, top videos, and top shared items of the day.
Can IE8 really gain back some market share because of this? Maybe not, but it is still a welcome effort from Microsoft. It looks as if Microsoft is trying its hands at the real-time bandwagon first and then (hopefully) proceed further with providing such features in the new decision engine from them, Bing. And of course it makes perfect sense to come up with Bing bundled in later IE versions.
Which means, every new PC sold = one new default IE user = one new test user for Bing.
Oh and yeah, as usual Firefox is already way ahead in this as OneRiot addons have been in the market for quite some time now! But maybe with all the good reviews floating around, Bing might just get these test users to stick around with it.
