Bing.com revisited… Google still supreme
by Stii
Still on the Bing.com train. I’m still impressed with the results it delivers when searching technical or programming issues compared with Google. Results are relevant and good. I’m liking it.
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.
I tried searching my name as part of a Bingo test… it came up with all sorts of random stuff I’ve done for clients and work, but not my portfolio or anything relevant. Google on the other hand came up with my porti, linked in profile and twitter, right off the bat.
So ja, I’m not impressed, no matter how much noise there is about Bing.
hey Stii I tried bing.com yesterday and I spent a few mins on it doing nothing realy. I wanted to search but didnt know what to search. and when I started working, I had something to search for . immidiately I hit CTRL + E on firefox and I realised bing was open but here I am searching via google ;)
I like picture of the day, and how they tell all this history, I also like how the give a preview of the result link, this way I can read if the link is what I need, before heading to it. anyway Google is still light years ahead in terms of brand name, image and technology.
lets see how it unfolds in a few months
Rox, I must say, Google also loves me more than Bing. There are some serious issues still with Bing’s search algorithm. I think they’ll hang themselves unless this changes in a week or so.
Mambenanje, they have a lot of fluff. It is all superfluous really. Unless they can do search and do it well, they’ll definitely lose the race.
@ Stii, I quite agree. Most folks have complained about the same thing. As a matter of fact, Matt Cutts recently had this really interesting twitter session with Bing’s Betsy on a similar issue, excerpts of which were featured here, courtesy yours truly.
O n the flip side though, I personally think the pros out-weigh cons on Bling.
Nice post man!
I will not be abandoning Google ever, ;)
Matt Cutts is paid by Google ;)
Have you tried Blind Search (http://blindsearch.fejus.com/)? Essentially you search for something and it will return the results from Yahoo, Google, and Bing. You then vote for the one you think is most accurate and it will reveal which search engine provided the results.
I only tried it a few times, but Bing didn’t come up.
Actually tried it yesterday, back then the results were; Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 21% | 8,518 votes, apparently the results had to be taken off cos according to him some “douche” was gaming the system- http://www.dtechweb-blog.com/2009/06/07/bing-in-google-out/#comment-525