It has been quite a while since Bing(Live), the search engine from Microsoft has been launched and many of you reading this would be wondering as to why am I comparing Bing to Google after such a long time. I wanted to use Bing extensively before even trying to compare it with Google. Google for me, has been THE search engine from the start. I did try Alta Vista, Ask, Yahoo Search but after a couple of searches then, I knew that I had to go to Google for all my web related searches.
After the huge hype sorrounding the launch of Bing, I decided to try it out. I made Google as my benchmark since I was comparing Bing against Google. I started off going with Bings punchline - "The Decision Engine". I couldnt figure out as to why MS calls Bing a decision engine. All of my searches just gave me search results. I typed in specific questions, but still search results. Maybe, I just dont get the whole concept of the decision engine!
My searches for specific terms like "Liz Hurley", "vancouver 2010", "super bowl", "nikon d90", etc. returned excellent results. As compared to Google, Bing returned more refined search reults on the search page directly rather than having to click on the results and figuring out myself. Moving on to my more generic searhes that included "best blogging sites", "mta schedule", "health care summit", etc. I found that Bing performed just about OK. Some of my searches returned almost similar results to what Google did. Others were not as good. Also when I searched for current news or events, I realized Google had a much broader base and that Google crawlers were made to work much harder. Google also seems to have an upper hand when it comes to searching within Blogs.
Now comes the part that impressed me the most. Type in terms like "risotto recipes", "flight tracker", "flight to sfo from nyc", "movie listing" or "weather 07306" . These queries returned answers that were relevant to what I was looking for. I did not have to look among the search results to locate my answer. Bing is hands down much more superior to Google in these kind of searches. A couple of other neat features that I liked about Bing were the "summary" feature that lets you get more information about a specific result and the "related searches" that come up on the left margin.
Overall, there are few areas where Bing does impress and beats Google, however overall I am a little disappointed that with all the engineering prowess of Microsoft, they have failed to raise the bar on web based textual searches. It seems that I will stick with Google and conintue Googling, ofcourse Bing once in a while!
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