Bing vs Google

RIVER BENDER - July,  2009

 

Sock it to Google?

I love Google. We all do. It's hard to believe that anyone would even consider making a search engine to compete with Google but Microsoft has and it's called "Bing." It came online worldwide on June 3 at www.bing.com. I haven't a clue where the name came from but I'll bet it won't be long before we'll be binging for answers as often as we google. Microsoft's Live Search and Yahoo Search never turned me on but I think Bing is here to stay and Google will finally have some competition. Of course, not everyone will agree, especially those that refer to Microsoft as the 'evil empire' and don't like anything they do. By the way, they call Bing a decision engine not a search engine. Steve Ballmer at MS says it will help the estimated 42% that are constantly unsatisfied with our initial search results, whatever that means.

Put a Bing icon on your desktop.

I'm going to assume you already have a Google icon on your desktop so I suggest you add one for Bing too because I think you'll be using both in the future. Create a Bing icon by going to www.bing.com and click on File, Send, Shortcut to Desktop.

What I like about Bing.

The first thing I noticed about Bing was how nicely uncluttered the pages were. There was less advertising on search results, which may change in time, but for now it's as if Microsoft decided that less information on a page is better, which is hard to believe after using their help pages. There's a lot of similarity between Bing and Google. For example, choices on Google's main page of Web, Images, Video, Maps, News, Shopping and Gmail are very similar on Bing.

A nice thing about Bing's videos is that you can hover your mouse over a video thumbnail and it enlarges slightly and begins playing. The fact that you're getting to see a thumbnail version of the video without going to the site means that you also avoid advertisements so there may be a legal problem. Google ran into this when they displayed thumbnail versions of photos in an adult magazine but a court found they didn't infringe under something called "fair use" of photos.

Like Google, Bing has numerous preferences that one can set up such as filtering of explicit sexual content into categories of Strict, Moderate and Off in addition to limiting searches to location and language.

I went back and forth between Google and Bing during numerous searches and was pleasantly surprised how well Bing compared to Google and yet often came up with different information. I loved the images and videos in Bing. But Google has a giant headstart and will probably remain #I. However, I think Microsoft has done a great job with Bing and it's refreshing to have a good alternative.