Saturday, June 06, 2009

Bing vs. Google... True Competition?

I started off with the article in Adage about the new slew of advertisements on Bing (http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137100) that talks about why they are different from Yahoo and Google. Bing Ads end off with:
"Find the cure at Bing.com. It's not just a search engine; it's the first-ever decision engine, from Microsoft."

So, this got me thinking, is there really a better search engine than Google, if it can miraculously only give the search results that we want? Even though every individual users have different search objectives with the same term?

I went to both Bing and Google and typed generic words like "Coffee mug", "mouse" and "wire". The stark difference was that Google will show the whole slate of pictures, news links, advertising banners, recommendations... while Bing only gives links of what the items are. Perhaps, for users who are often overwhelmed by the amount of information that Google spews, Bing is indeed cleaner and much nicer. However, I'm personally used to Google's layout. It's not too cluttered, I like the variety of search results and I'm often not tempted to click on any advertisers links, so these ad-links are almost pyschologically invisisble to me.

There are a couple more voices on Bing from various sites (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2009/06/microsofts_bing_yes_its_not_go.html?hpid=sec-tech) and (http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/06/04/new_microsoft_search_service_doesnt_match_google/?page=2), but all are saying that while Bing is not a "Google-killer", it's definitely an improvement from the MSN search.

Would that be the aim of Bing? Just an upgrade of MSN search? Or are they ready to join the "big boys table" and take on Google head to head and hopefully, be the top search engine?

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