Since many of our readings discuss the future of Google or Google’s impact on our lives, I thought I would also write about a search engine. Many call this Google’s competitor and others say it’s a long way behind.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine is relatively new in the web-world but everybody knows about it. They launched many commercials and advertising campaigns so everybody could hear about and want to use Bing. Were they hoping for a stampede type switch off from Google to Bing? I think so, but if anybody did try to switch over they quickly found themselves using trusty ol’ Google again.
Many people found that their search words were not finding the correct results. Their questions asked would not work. It would bring you to some story pertaining to the topic but not the answer one was hoping for. Google has spoiled us in that way. It takes two words to find just what we were looking for, usually happens to be that first link. Over some time, Bing has updated and tried to perfect their search results.
Another way Google has spoiled us is with its fastest return result times. Loading the page or clicking the search button, Google delivers results to us approximately four time faster than other search engines, especially Bing. Many people have complained that Bing is slow and sluggish. This results in a negative community experience as the wait for data transferring is much slower than our impatient, anxious minds can handle!
Many people use Google for news searches and Google does a great job at organizing those within their News tab. Bing on the other hand, puts all their news results on a “More” page that you must click on. Before seeing that, you will encounter Windows Live, MSN, and Shopping.
But, I’m not so much a Bing hater myself and can definitely point out some neat benefits that it offers. Their travel and local results is displayed prominently on their results pages and people have an advantage seeing this when most search engines don’t connect their results with their Facebook friend’s results or travel deals.
Bing also has a great feature that involves their video thumbnails. A lot of people search for specific videos and have to wait through ads and skip through videos just to figure out if that’s the one they were hoping for. Bing allows people to hover over a thumbnail and a video sample plays.
Bing has its ups and downs but at least it’s a player in the game and it is used by many people so it’s holding up. If any search engine will ever triumph Google is still a mystery.