Microsoft's Bing got Zing
It is quite a popular phrase nowadays that BING stands for ‘Bing Is Not Google’. Indeed it is not. It is in fact a next gen search engine which makes Google look quite dated to be honest. So does it mean that Microsoft is finally going to takeover Google’s dominance on web search? Well, that’d be saying too much too early; still Bing is a significant step forward for Microsoft in web search territory.
Engine
Google still boasts mightier database but Bing has a smarter search engine focussed on ‘relevant results’, and it works. You are more likely to find the page you are looking for higher on Bing’s result page than on Google’s. However, this is true only for lay-users; Google scores Bing when it comes to technical searches.
Interface
If it’s from Microsoft, it’s got to be looker! Where Bing scores most is the interface. In web search results, when you hover over a link, a content summary pops up enabling the user to know whether or not the content is relevant without having to open the site. Image search has always been better than Google since the Live Search days with easy to access filters coupled with a great layout and Bing makes almost no changes to that. Bing’s video search is The Best - period. When you hover over video result, you actually see a preview clip of the video and not just an enlarged thumbnail. Although the clip sampling can be a little odd in some results, overall it is just fantastic.
Bing is the next big thing on the web and is quite capable of giving Google a run for its money. For an average user it doesn’t matter whether a search fetches 1 million or 10 million results, what matters is whether the results are useful. Google has splendid search engine no doubt but Bing has an additional advantage of a user friendly interface besides relevant results. For me that is enough to make a transition from Google to Bing which is bitter sweet, as till recently I’d swear by Google. I hope Google rises up to the competition from Microsoft; until that happens though, my soul is sold to Bing.
My apologies to Google fans but journalism expects objectivity and hence with all factors considered Bing did score over Google. But I'm not the only one. Even Sergey Brin thinks so! Here is an excerpt from Fox News:
"But co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned.
Brin, according to sources inside the tech behemoth, is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing's crucial search algorithm differs from that used by the company he founded in 1998 with Stanford University classmate Larry Page."
Ashwin Mehendale
[ratings]
Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
