YEARS AFTER most people had grown accustomed to using Google or, less often, Yahoo!, for their web searches, anybody hoping to shake up that state of affairs had better bring persistence and a pile of cash to the table.
In other words, it might help to be Microsoft, which launched a search engine called Bing (bing.com) last week.
Bing suffers from some handicaps, starting with one whose initials happen to spell out: “But It’s Not Google.” However, Bing works fairly well as a general-purpose search engine, outperforms competitors in a couple of areas and makes a contribution to mobile web searching. There’s something to see here, and not just the hype that $100 million (€71 million) of marketing can buy.
Sometimes Bing can beat Google, such as when it found an old column of mine when its competitor could only suggest pages talking about that story. In other cases, Google served up the correct result and it was Bing that yielded second-hand links.
Searches on more generic terms, however, can leave Bing confused. When I looked up the company that made a telemarketing call to my home phone number, Bing was lost unless I enclosed my query in quotes. Google’s results directed me to a report on its activities.
Bing search results include a clever bonus: a preview of each page’s text that appears when you float the cursor to the right of each result. But if you position the cursor in the wrong place, you won’t even see the vertical line and orange circle that are meant to cue you about this feature’s existence.
On the other hand, Bing makes its advanced search options a little more accessible than Google’s, since selecting them doesn’t take you away from your current search results.
Note that your IP address will remain in Microsoft’s log of your search for the next 18 months. In comparison, Google starts to anonymise its log data after nine months, and Yahoo! only waits 90 days to wipe its records.
Bing fared worse in news searches, where it often located far fewer items than Google News. – ( Washington Post service)
