It’s been more than six months since Microsoft launched the Bing search engine. The company heavily promotes the service (as the “Decision Engine”) with TV advertising, something Google never has needed.
Yahoo! was all over the airwaves for a few weeks with the “It’s Y!ou” campaign, which was more about corporate rebranding than advertising its search capabilities. They’re using Bing on their sites now.
While Google still heavily dominates the Web search market, Bing is proving a substantial contender, increasing market share for Microsoft this year. The two companies are constantly trying to one-up each other, as with Microsoft’s search deals with Facebook and Twitter, or Google’s unveiling real-time search.
I regularly use both search engines in my job as an insights editor for Hoover’s, and I have to say I’m impressed by Bing. I find the competing search engines turn up similar results, and sometimes they differ in interesting ways.
For example: Today I searched for “Martin Luther” on Bing and Google. Both turned up Wikipedia‘s page on the Protestant theologian at the top of the results returned. Then, those results diverge.
Bing next offers an entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia, then a university page, a review of two books on Luther published in 1999, and a page from the PBS site.
After Wikipedia’s page, Google offers a page on Greatsite.com that appeared sixth in Bing’s results, followed by that Catholic Encyclopedia page, Luther-related listings under books.google.com, a different university page, and the PBS site page.
It should also be noted that Bing’s seventh-ranked result is the Wikipedia page on Martin Luther King, Jr. Hmm — looks like one of those overreaching, irrelevant results that other search engines produce, according to Microsoft’s commercials for Bing.
One thing I like about Bing (that could be a catchy slogan!) is how it previews what’s on the pages it’s found, beyond the couple lines of text you’ll see on most search engine results. Bing also brings up images of its search subject at the top of the page, and offers a series of “related searches” to the left of the search results. In this instance, Google put its image results at the bottom of the results page, which only had a “sponsored link” on the right side for a DVD of a 1953 biopic on Luther.
On the other hand, I like how Google’s browser toolbar (or its Chrome browser, which features one box for search terms and Web addresses) prompts me for search terms while I’m typing, saving a few seconds. I have yet to see Bing do that in the Internet Explorer 7 search toolbar (we’re not up to IE 8 at work yet).
What’s been your experience with these search engines? Are there better ones that are as easy to use?
Download the Bing toolbar you’ll get the same functionality…
I have to say that although I still use Google 98% of the time, I would really like to see Bing/Yahoo get a bigger share of the market.
Bing and Yahoo’s search pages are still too… busy. They need to clean them up a bit more.
I have noticed a new trend lately – Google are losing people’s trust. They used to be all abut “Do no evil” but they have become so big that people see them in the same light as Microsoft 10 years ago.
google.com looks clean and is user-friendly. I’m not fond of the results which Bing gets me, and it has been so long since I’ve actually found anything on the yahoo search function. When I need to find something and Google doesn’t have it, I go to altavista.com
When I look up the news on Bing, the whole thing is one long block that I have to scroll down through. The different group titles are in orange, and the article titles are in blue. Both are the same size font. This looks absolutely terrible to me and is difficult to scan through, hence I go to google where the news is split up into boxes.
When Google omits similar sites, I can choose to see what they are. Bing tells me it has omitted something, but I’m not allowed to click to see what was omitted. I prefer to figure out what is and is not useful to me, because while the ‘decision engine’ might be somewhat useful, when it doesn’t work I would like to search manually through the different sites.
The shopping function fares poorly in my mind. Google’s shopping search is like an advanced ebay shopping search. I can look from the highest to lowest price, and switch that around. To do a different type of search, I can use a drop bar menu. Bing has link/buttons for the ‘search by’ function which, when I click them, disappear. I don’t know whether I am searching by what is left, because more than one of these buttons is left.