Bing.com – a Microsoft product that doesn’t suck?
by Stii
Could it possibly be?! I mean, I’m NOT a Microsoft fan AT ALL. In fact, the further I can stay away from their products, the better I feel. Luckily I thought I’d give it a shot and check out Bing.com, Microsoft’s new search engine. To my surprise and delight it doesn’t suck!
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.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
It looks like an interesting system. I will definately take a second look at it. I saw that there was this trend on twitter for bing but i had no idea what it was :). I found out about it a couple of days ago while chatting to a friend.
While you are looking at new search engines here is a new take on the whole search thing: http://wolframalpha.com
I am beginning to like Bing. Need to get use to the different feel, but once that is done, not at all bad.
Well, for technical searches it works brilliant. I quite like it!
Hi, Congratulations to the site owner for this marvelous work you’ve done. It has lots of useful and interesting data.
Bing does give search results much like Google but i would have to say that Google still gives more relevant search results.
i have been using the BING search engine for a couple of weeks. it seems to be as good as Google but for some reason i would still want to stick with Google search engine.
i am us ing both Bing and Google and i think both search engines give relevant search results. i would still prefer Google though, because it gives a little bit more relevant search results than Bing.
BING search engine is just as good as Google. In my own personal experience, Google does give more releveant search result than Bing but the difference is very small. **
my default search engine is Yahoo but now i am using BING because it is much better than Yahoo. i heard that Bing search engine would power Yahoo search also.
i think that Bing is not as good as Google. Google would still index new websites faster than Bing. Microsoft would still need a lot of catching to do with GoogleBot.
I use both Bing and Google search engine and i dont see much difference in their search results. I use google for searching hard to find academic topics and Bing for general search.
It is interesting to compare the performance of Bing and Google search but i haven’t seen any difference at all in their performance. .