Microsoft Partners With HackerRank To Make Bing The Search Engine Of Choice For Programmers

Bing logoDevelopers are those people who have to create something out of nothing. With the internet, they are all having the world's knowledge within a few clicks/taps. But with all the information the World Wide Web has to give, the right answer is somehow hidden between its massive resources. Finding things on the web, even with the aid of tools and search engines, has not been an easy task.

You may experience the same thing when you were looking for a particular thing on the web, programmers experience the same thing.

Microsoft has an idea. And that targets those developers that hunger for information but difficult to find them. Partnering with HackerRanks, a company that focuses on competitive programming challenges, the tech giant takes its search engine Bing to a whole new level by making things easier for developers to search for a function and instantly get the solution.

"Typically, engineers go to search engines to get answers on various sites, like Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange and other blogs," wrote Marcelo De Barros, group engineering manager at Bing, and Vivek Ravisankar, CEO and co-founder of HackerRank, in a blog post. "Now, you have a streamlined alternative that will not only spit out the code solution you need but also edit the code and play with it in real-time."

On top of that, the two also provides a live code editor that can be accessed straight inside Bing. According to De Barros and Ravisankar, one of the biggest productivity pitfalls programmers face is having to find a solution and then having to transfer it all back into their editor. Here, Bing's live code editor can save programmers much time by making their workflow to be more efficient.

In short, when a programmer searches for a query, Bing can provide them with both the solution and the option to edit the code directly within the results page.

"In addition to learning how a certain algorithm/code is written in a given language, users will also be able to check how the same solution is constructed in a range of other programming languages to - providing a Rosetta Stone model for programming languages," wrote De Barros.

So if a user searches for a common programming term, lets say: "bubble sort Python", the widget below should appear. And within that widget, They can also switch to other languages Microsoft has included.

Bing - bubble sort Python

Another One Against Google

Bing has made it to an extent that searching and finding solutions for developers is just a mere search and answer. Usually, developers and programmers often search for the right algorithm and different ways to perform a specific task, if compared to ordinary keywords searches most people are doing. Until now, they had to first search for something (on Google, for example), and then read the corresponding library or discussion thread about it on another site.

This is a challenge for Microsoft, and sees this as an opportunity to ramp up its effort for Bing.

When programmers want to solve a programming question, or just to sharpen their skills, they have the ability to bring up Bing's interactive code editor by entering a programming question straight into its search bar. When Bing picks up the keywords correctly, the search engine will then bring snippets of interactive codes.

At the moment of the release, the programming languages supported include: C, C++, C#, Python, PHP, and Java.

According to Vivek Ravisankar, Bing's code editor features over 80 of the most commonly searched programming terms.

With this feature, Microsoft hopes that Bing could become developers' search engine of choice as the company continues to improve the productivity and education of both new and seasoned developers. This feature isn't available on Google when Bing has it, so this is just another competitive advantage for Microsoft. Especially to developers that are on the prowl for new information.

At its initial state, the company is pushing the feature gradually and not simultaneously to all users. Furthermore, not every programming examples or terms are present. Developers and programmers may still need Stack Overflow and others. But Bing here certainly becomes a more useful tool for developers and those learning to code, more than ever.

Bing snippets Java