Ever since bing's high voltage launch, there have been several claims that bing is not a cosmetic change to 'live.com' but a serious challenge to google's monopoly in search engine market. Having turned from a google fan to google critic off late, I got excited. And I moved on to bing as my default search engine.
The first impressions were good. I like the homepage's background images. I really like the feature of providing summary of results on the results page. It really improves the searching experience. But the fun did not last long. In a few days I started noticing that many a times bing did not deliver what I was looking for. And I had to go to google to find things I have been looking for.
Few of the search results on bing that confounded me more than others are listed below:
Search query: ie8 download
Microsoft's site exploremyway.com appears on both, bing and google, as a sponsored listing. None of the organic search results on bing are from Microsoft site or lead to download of IE8. In contrast, first link on google's organic search results is the IE8 download page on microsoft.com.
Search query: Bing
This one is actually funny. Only 1 result on google was not related to bing, the search engine by Microsoft. On bing 8 results on the first page were NOT related to bing, the decision engine. So as per bing, 'bing' the search engine is the not the most important bing!
Search query: 160by2
That's our FREE SMS site with more than 50M pageviews in a month. It was a kind of vanity search!Only two of bing results were non 160by2.com pages. All other results were pointing to various sections within 160by2.com website such as the blog, or the mobile website and so on. On contrary google results pointed to independent sources that talked about 160by2, like independent bloggers, or media sites.
Later on I realised this to be an issue with quite a few of searches on bing, that different sections of the same website were being presented as different results. Try searching for microsoft, apple, yahoo, rediff...Not sure if its merely a presentation issue. But I have started doubting on the reach of bing's crawler. It does not seem to match up with google's. Update: Google also does the same thing, displaying different channels from same website as different results, especially for a content rich site like yahoo or rediff. But when I am looking for apple, I may be looking beyond apple.com, something that google recognises, but bing does not.
There is a long way to go for bing. I for one believe that google needs a serious competitor to stop it turning from evil. And if microsoft believes bing is the one, then they need to work hard, very hard. Do share you feedback on bing if you have used it.
PS: While I have not seen any ads on the side bar on bing, but sponsored ads on top of organic search results are coming from overture i.e. Yahoo. Is something cooking there as well?
a couple of things
ReplyDelete1. Real value of Bing is in the related searches for example if u do a search on new york it will bring up travel option, weather, maps(google also does this)
2. The related searches are different for differnt searches so if you search for honda accord it will bring up review, price, repairs, recalls, specs. In google you have to mostly mention these as search text or scan through the results to get to these.
Thanks Kholu. Actually I missed it. Related search, along with summary on search page make it definitely more usable.
ReplyDeleteHope their indexing exceeds that og google soon.