I’m sure you’ve seen the recent ads for Bing.com featuring “The Cure for Search Overload.”
I’ve been poking around the site for a bit now, and I really can’t see how this is any different than google. If anything, its a more difficult to use than Google because you’ve got all sorts of distractions on the front page. The search results are nearly identical, and every cool thing they show you how to do “New York to San Francisco flights” you can do in Google (and with better accuracy because you can add dates…)
When you do a normal search you get the same amount, if not more, of information as you do with Google, Ask, Yahoo, etc. What could Microsoft be thinking?
just because the results page looks similar doesnt mean there arent tweaks under the hood. Though i do agree its not revolutionary, more like slight improvement on the current status quo.
Has anyone ever seen a TV commercial for google, facebook, twitter, flickr… ? I get the feeling MS doesn’t understand the market their operating in. All attempts, that I can remember, at selling web solutions (mainly search engines) through traditional marketing channels have been glorious failures.
The only real success I can remember is iTunes, but then Apple really are selling the iPod which in turn means people are buying into iTunes at the same time.
Dunno what the situation is elsewhere (I’m in Europe), but does anyone know if anyone has ever succeeded in what MS is trying to do?
Thats what I thought too- but Bing brought up quite a few pages that I did not get when I went on google.
I did a search for “Ryobi Tek4” a line of technical jobsite tools that we are in the process of releasing. No advertising yet, so it is a few snippets here and there. Google brought up a good spread, but Bing brought in an obscure page from our HongKong website, and a few related pages that did not turn up in google.
So it is a good double check I think. I dont mind the less funtional graphics either. Frankly google is a very engineering driven company, which is why Android doesnt have much pop, while WebOS and OSX which are far more “designed” and less controlled by metrics have a much more pleasant experience. Google is a great example of a well-engineered product. It is not design driven in the least, but still delivers a solid experience. It prototypes functionality, which delights users. I saw this most clearly in the difference between yahoo apps which have a very apple feel, in comparison to google apps which are relatively clean, efficient, but dont have a cutting edge feel to them. So I am glad that there are alternatives to a purely engineered user experience ie- minimum effort to get the job done. A little “fat” in the design process helps though, a little more than the minimum that google produces.
I am glad that MS is still fighting in this space. Keeps google from getting complacent. It is an uphill battle what with google being embedded in iphones, Android units, Mozilla and Chrome. Not sure that it will gain it back, but I root for the underdog.
Google is still top-dog, but Bing (aargh stupid name) is a decent double check.
A little late to add to this thread but WTH. I’ve started to find Bing gives better results when searching for technical data. Google has been bombed with to many hits from the likes of Thomas.net, Patentstorm, freepatents online, alibaba, etc. All of which are completely useless web pages (at least I haven’t been able to find a use for them). When searching Bing I get much more relevant hits.
Examples:
Laser Welding
Anodizing (google’s #3 hit is a paintball site for Pete’s sake!)
I was using their travel section yesterday - it actually seems rather good. Gives you sliders to filter your time ranges which works kind of nicely rather than changing times and resubmitting. Also tells you if it thinks the rates will go down or up - not sure how accurate that is, but it’s a nice feature.
I’ve decided today to spend the rest of the month using Bing where I would normally use Google. Already this morning I used Google to find a few things and found exactly what I wanted. I used Bing, and got different results. Oh, and one of those happened to involve a Twitter update, and Bing didn’t find it. That’s one of the things that supposedly has made Bing a big hit lately (its connection to Twitter that is…)
I remember anytime I needed to download patches and updates for microsoft software, Google would always have it as the first 3 results, while live.com would give me documentation, readmes, text articles, discussions, everything except the DOWNLOAD ITSELF, which tended to be on page 3.
With bing it’s at least on the first page now.
Good job MS, you can successfully return good results for your own webpages with your own software, at last!
Apart from that I think the features are quite nice. Maybe I’m just hating on it too much based on live search experiences, and the logo design. They’re trying to push using it through search results for news stories on msn.com, but I think this is eventually going to backfire on them when a particular search for news items returns completely wrong things, from the few times I’ve clicked on the news event search I did eventually get to a decent article, but overall I think this idea was silly.