Bing overhauls video search, puts Google's offering on its toes

Microsoft's Bing search engine has been steadily gaining in US market share since 2010, but it still has a long road ahead in its potentially fruitless attempts to dethrone Google. Its strategy in that department -- to out-feature the no-frills search behemoth -- has proven effective in the past, and Microsoft has once again managed to keep up the fight with an overhauled video search function.

Announced Wednesday, the new Bing video search was designed "from the ground up," Microsoft's official Bing blog reveals, to put the focus on navigation and discovery while easing maneuverability between different quality streams through a set of smarter filters.

First and foremost, Bing has updated its key pop-out preview feature that reduces the need to travel directly to a site by adding in additional volume and playback controls. It also now features more identifiable video origin markers -- be it YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, and so on -- and added in playback quality and number of views. Aspects like playback quality are also now built into Bing's filter system.

And aesthetically, the search engine now has a video overlay feature once you click something you'd like to watch that provides easier navigation to related videos and searches.

While it's not going to have users flocking in droves -- and Microsoft certainly won't want to peg its search engine as nothing more than a solid video aggregator -- Bing's video search is quickly becoming one of its smoothest and most well-designed features (even if it involves the less-than-glorious pornographic video market that Bing's grappled with in the past).