Sadly, I cannot say the same for everything else… I started reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and finished the first book, so I thought I’d go to the library and get me the second book in the series. I know where the library is, but wanted to check up to what time they are open on a Saturday. Not a problem! I’ll hit Bing.com and simply check. Typed in “Durbanville library” and…

…Mother of Mayhem! The first result is shocking! Well, I suppose it is good for my friends running Capestay.co.za, but it is not at all what I had in mind… Durbanville Accommodation – Highlands lodge. WTF?!

Google on the other hand produced it bang on target. Guess that proves you cannot abandon Google just yet.

Why? Why is it so great with technical searches and so utterly crap with everything else? I don’t know yet. They better sort this out quickly while people are still willing to look at them. It is hard convincing users to try again once they’ve made up their minds that it sucks. And they’re dangerously close at being labeled that way. Look at Cuill… People want a Google competitor, but do it right, for heavens sake, or not at all.

In fact, I’d go as far as saying it is pretty good. Yes, I’m not getting the same love for this blog from Bing as I do from Google. In Google I rank higher for certain terms than I do for the same terms in Bing. Now I’m not hung up on traffic like the SEO experts. I can imagine it would be a real issue for them. I honestly don’t mind or care.

I was a little taken aback when I searched for linux and rugby on Bing and it returned a bunch of results from Australia while I’m in South Africa. Not ideal. On a rugby front we’re not the biggest Aussie fans, you know! Ok, thats not too good…

Then I did searches for “python concurrent programming” on both Bing and Google. The results were almost virtually the same. Ok, so it is not all crap then for technology searches. I did a couple more and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was little or no differences. In fact, Bing returned more helpful stuff higher up than Google!

Then I hit pay dirt… I compiled Stackless Python and ran into some system issues. So I copied and pasted the error message into Google (like I would normally do) and nothing really helpful. So I tried Bing and BADA BING BADA BANG! Not one, but a couple of helpful results which solved my problem virtually immediately! Needless to say, I’m impressed… I could have been lucky, true. Thing is, I’m going to use it from now on for technical issues, since it helped me once and I hope it would help me again.

Forget all the fluff around Bing. By fluff I mean the related searches and funky video/images stuff. That is all superfluous bullshit. What Google gave the world was simple search that delivered reasonably good results. Until now, there was nothing that could really match Google. It pains me to say, but well done Microsoft.

I do shiver at the thought that Bing is powered by a bunch of Windows servers. That leaves horrible mental images… I tried to check what it runs on, but their headers don’t say, so I assume.

Internet users are increasingly looking for answers to their search questions, not just a list of sites in response to a query.

We’ve grown accustomed to knowing how to optimize our search queries, simply to get the best result. Then you have to deal with the overeager SEO experts who have optimized the least ideal sites for the highest result, resulting in frustration. Lets not go into that other than saying searching is not finding answers.

To find answers, the best place to go is probably a social network. You ask a question, you find answers or at least the best route to the answer. If the humans on the other end of the network don’t know, they normally know of someone who does.

This is what happened to me on Twitter the other day. I was looking into the Groovy programming language and although Google returned a myriad of absolutely great results, it was not a quick answer to my question. In fact, Google’s results raised much more questions for me, so you can understand my frustration :/ As if I need more questions :P Instead a friend of mine on Twitter @geniusboywonder said I should talk to @aslamkhn about Groovy and suddenly I’ve got immediate and relevant answers to my n00b, dumb questions without reading through tons of sites. Exactly what I was looking for! I’m happy.

The interesting part of all this is Google realizes that this is a trend in search behavior. Who could have ever thought that there would come a day when the almighty Google have to be concerned about their search product. Whether you think they are concerned or not, they did raise the issue, which indicates that they are taking it serious. It should be really interesting to see what they come up with :)

Let’s say I’m searching for Jeanette Verster. So I type it in the search box and hit enter.

It returns the results as found in blog posts and news articles, but now, in the sidebar it will display all blogs found matching the criteria.

What is really cool about all this is that not only does it find Jeanette’s blog, it also shows where she is mentioned. (as seen in the image below when Nerdmag interviewed Jeanette) NIFTY!

I like to think about it as “one search to rule them all“. :P (its a joke… lots to be done still concerning search!)