bing: Now more than just an elevator sound

By Booyor, on June 8th, 2009

Check out http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ to form your own opinion first. It lets you search Yahoo, Google, and Bing at the same time and then vote on the best results.

You’ve probably seen the commercials for bing. But how many have taken a look?

It dawned on me yesterday that as a librarian I should know how to navigate it and understand the pros and cons.

What a weighty responsibility I have – do you realize this? I shape the future, much in the way Nen Yim fuses poison darts into fingertips.

I heard it from an inside source that Bing stands for “Bing is not Google”.

I think the only way to solve this is simple: Battle Royale. Some may demand that I go to the Deadliest Warrior depths of simulation algorithms, but I think the typings of a madman shall suffice for the preliminaries.
vs.

The Yuuzhan Vong Challenge

I typed in Nen Yim to bing and the first result was the Wookieepedia article. The next two were about a Gamespot user profile, followed by a Yahoo Star Wars community beta image, then the Talk comment for the Wookiepedia entry.

I typed Nen Yim into Google. The first result was Wookieepedia, a branch off (a little bit easier to read) was the Talk page, followed by a Facebook page, a feed-stealer site that copied the Wookieepedia entry, and finally a profile result for a fan fiction network.

The verdict: there are a lot of Star Wars nerds on the Internet.

maps.site.com
Google takes me to the U.S. by default.
Bing takes me to the Southwest by default.

I typed in my address (even though I was already being Binged (many connotations based on pronunciation) ) and Bing found it without trouble.

I really dig the popular business categories listing, finding the results in my area. Bird’s eye view is easier to interpret than the satellite view from Google.

Don’t click on Bing’s “Explore collections”. Talk about search overload – I got a whole bunch of letters and numbers that have no meaning for me.

Google has a place for me to search and has lots of breadcrumbs to get to other searches. Bing took me some time to find my way beyond the prescribed searches.

The verdict: for pretty picture, Bing; for pretty code, Google.

I really like the front page of Bing. The picture of the day, with different hotspots, is pretty fun. I love information, following fact trails.

So the feature of the day on Bing is something that I appreciate. This weekend they had Normandy Beach (versus Tetris on Google and Land of the Lost on Dogpile), with lots of information. You click on different parts of the picture and it brings up articles and video about the topic of the day.

This morning I wanted to go back to that information, losing interest in the pictures of people eating at the San Antonio Riverwalk. In order to click on the navigation arrows on the photo to go back, I would need to install Silverlight. What would happen if I wanted to go to a different computer and show someone the cool topic from tomorrow?

The verdict: for not making me install stuff and tracking me without any inconvenience, Google wins the match-up.

Finding Sumo Blogs that Have Me in their Blogroll

The verdict: Bing wins!

Who would win in a knife fight, Google, Yahoo, or Bing?

The verdict: Did the search:Google.

The winner? By a landslide, Wolfram|Alpha. It can’t get me any information on anything I search for on a daily basis, but have you seen it generate ISBN barcodes? Cool!

Bing is already a household name, but he sang “White Christmas”.

Google was a Square One math fun fact until the search engine made it a verb.

Microsoft is going to need to throw even more ad money at the project (either that or innovate) to be able to replace Google in our minds. I have enjoyed the Search Overload commercials more than the iTunes overgeneralization or the Find a Laptop omission of details campaign (“These are small.” Really? A small laptop? Imagine that. And who buys a laptop for gaming? Do I need to educate you on modding the innards of the case, youngling?).

The saddest part? Once they got rid of the butler, Ask.com is just another collection of random shouts mixed with ad links.

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