/Big Question/ The Bing question
13/10/2009 | Filed under Discover > Big Question
What are your initial thoughts on Microsoft’s Bing search engine?
Internet playboy
Drew Curtis
Fark
So last quarter. Bring on the next hyped-up ‘Google-killer’. I think I’m going to start calling Fark a ‘Google-killer’ just so I can get free publicity.
Drew is the owner of Fark.com
Web application expert
Tim Bohn
Esperto
When it comes to search, latency is everything. Google has always stuck to this and it’s at the heart of its design philosophy. If you compare the Bing search, it’s those few milliseconds extra you have to wait that will keep people coming back to the market leader. If and when Microsoft gets this aspect of its engine on par, we could see a ‘battle of the search algorithms’. This can only be good for consumers.
Tim is director of web agency Esperto
Hosting specialist
Neil Barton
Hostway, UK
When Bing was launched a few months ago, Microsoft made a song and dance about the fact that it wasn’t just a search engine but instead it was a ‘decision engine’. However, when you cut through the marketing spin, the reality is that it’s Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Google as the king of search. The fact is: Google is still king.
For the good of the internet, I think it’s good that Google is challenged when it comes to search, but in my experience so far, Bing still comes up short when it comes to providing relevant, location-based and contextual information. I personally use Google as a good way to track news stories relating to my company. However, when I did the same using Bing it returned one solitary result when I knew there were more stories out there.
This is not to say that Bing hasn’t got some innovative features. I particularly like the pop-up information box that appears to the right of the search results, as it gives you a much better idea of what’s on the sites you’re being given links to. It’s a little thing but can save you the time and frustration of having to click through to each search result.
Bing is still very much a beta release, so I envisage it will improve over time like Google did. But in reality, Microsoft faces a tough fight to be the number two search engine, let alone number one.
Neil is the director of Hostway UK
Activist
Oxblood Ruffin
Hactivismo
I think it’s a piece of shite.
Oxblood Ruffin is the founder of human rights pressure group Hacktivismo
Hosting specialist
Dominic Monkhouse
PEER 1
Never used it, don’t care. 95 per cent of search in the UK is Google.
Dominic Monkhouse is UK MD at PEER 1
Ecommerce expert
Ben Dyer
Actinic
If I’m really honest, I’m fairly disappointed with Bing. As soon as it broke that Microsoft was going to ditch its Live platform, I spent some time following the rumours that it was about to launch a Google-beater. Sadly, the hype and the reality are poles apart. It’s just another search engine with another silly name that still isn’t as accurate as Google. (I like the pictures, though!)
I recently spent an afternoon with some of the Bing team here in the UK. While supping over a pint, they readily admitted they’re not looking to beat Google within a short time frame: they talk of a gradual growth in market share. This of course will accelerate hugely as soon as Yahoo adopts Bing as its search engine.
Google is accurate because it took the fundamental SEO rules and made them work for its search. As Google has grown, designers and implementers have refined their sites for Google. The challenge with Bing is how quickly its alternative SEO rules are adopted. If the design community embrace it, I expect Bing to be a success.
Ben Dyer is director of product development at Actinic
Project manager
Ané-Mari Peter
on-IDLE
Bing appears to be the fastest growing search engine, sorry ‘decision engine’ at the moment, but it will be interesting to see if the stats hold up or whether it was just initial curiosity and boredom with Google’s interface that gave it the growth spurt.
I like the pictures and little information square rollovers – the interface is not too cluttered generally if you compare it to Ask Jeeves, Yahoo or the previous incarnations of MSN/Live. The left-hand side ‘explorer’ plane is quite useful if you’re in a buying mood, but I’m finding it too sales-driven when doing academic or subject-specific research that doesn’t involve retail or travel. The ability to turn off the ‘suggestions’ rollover is a good feature, as is the site content preview, and of course the Visual Search feature, which allows you to review categories by picture, is impressive. Something weird is going on with the ‘sponsored sites’, though – some really irrelevant results come up, which again are sales-driven. I know that Bing needs advertising to grow, but a cheap hotel when I’m trying to find a market-specific supplier (that is not travel- or accommodation-related at all) is a wrong result, so I’ll check the search in Google or Yahoo.
So I have two new problems – not trusting the search results and needing more time as I have to check search results in multiple engines and the sheer number of tabs on my browser is getting quite frightening. Now I’ve started to search concurrently using a useful little site called Search 3 – you can select which engines to compare, even Twitter or Flickr, which allows me to compare search results as well engines’ performance.
Ané-Mari is the co-founder of on-IDLE
Business specialist
Dickie Armour
Fibranet Services Ltd
I use Bing from time to time and there are some exciting features that I think will really help it continue to grow and take market share from the other major search engines.
Bing Travel is a very clever cost-saving feature that enables you to compare the cost of flights and hotels. The display is very nice and easy on the eye.
The other exciting feature –still only available in the US – is Visual Search. This offers an interface that displays photos of people’s faces, which you can use to find people you know. Again the display is very good.
Bing also offers a cashback program for shopping online which gives up to 30 per cent of the purchase price back on any search on Bing that results in an online purchase!
Bing also utilises Twitter search in the searches so you get a much better relevance and perspective as you search via Bing. And I like the Preview option, which you can use to preview a website via a preview window within Bing. This saves you time not looking at the wrong pages.
I still use Google, mainly because I use Google Reader and Analytics, but every now and then I do switch to Bing just to see how the searches compare.
Dickie Armour is general manager of Fibranet Services
Analytics specialist
Christian Howes
WebTrends
I think it’s fair to say that Bing is giving Google a run for its money. According to the latest figures from Neilsen, Bing is now the fastest growing search engine with a solid 10 per cent of the market share. As it looks to build on this, Microsoft is constantly improving the search experience. For example, the ‘visual search’ feature is a triumph for result visualisation.
However, the bad news for Microsoft is that Google won’t allow Bing to gain too much momentum through innovation. Every time Microsoft launches a successful new feature, Google won’t be far behind with its own version.
Still, any tit-for-tat enhancements will be a win-win situation for consumers. Competition merely serves to illustrate how fundamentally different and complementary the two companies are. However, in the long term Microsoft will always be vulnerable to Google’s open platform ideology because of its dependency on its own proprietary software.
Christian Howes is digital solutions architect at web analytics company WebTrends
Hosting specialist
Lawrence Jones
UKFast
Google recently stated that speed is crucial to online success. It reinforced this message by offering a reduction in the cost of its Google Adwords “quality score”, which rewards advertisers with higher placements for less money for faster performing sites.
When tested by a testing environment known as the PageRank Project, a group of servers on a variety of networks across the UK, Bing actually was faster than Google.
The race is on.
Relevance is key to the success of a search engine. However, the single most important factor a search engine must provide is the delivery of information faster than other sites. Google has done this consistently and outperformed everyone to date.
But Bing’s arrival is dramatic and must be making the Google board quake.
People want things quickly: we don’t like to queue. The same applies on the internet, and faster broadband connections only make slow sites more obvious and annoying.
Google always understood the relationship between speed and success better than anyone else on the internet. However, it appears that Bing has adopted a similar strategy and is making massive inroads.
Just as we click away from a site that loads slowly, people will just as quickly move away from a giant like Google if something comes along that’s quicker and more accurate.
The internet user is not loyal to a brand, we’re results-driven and hungry for information. We’re not demanding, we just want it NOW!
Lawrence Jones is MD of UKFast, a global hosting provider
Social media and comms expert
Rachel Hawkes
Elemental Communications
Out of habit, I use Google for all my searches and rarely stray to other engines. This habit has only been able to form because time and time again, Google met my searching needs.
In preparing to write my thoughts on Bing, I thought I should actually give it another crack and try out a few searches. To my utter surprise, I actually quite liked it. Once I got past the garish image backdrop and entered my search term, the results weren’t too bad at all.
What I particularly liked was that the ‘related searches’ field was easily visible in the far left-hand column, so if I wasn’t easily impressed with the results, I could search for something similar without scrolling to the bottom of the listings as you have to do on Google. What I also liked was the images and videos at the bottom, particularly the video, which returns more varied sources than the Google-owned YouTube and Google Video. Instead, Bing delivers me videos from BBC, ESPN, YouTube and MySpace, and when my mouse hovers over a video it starts to play. I like that.
Also, what I liked about Google Images is that there’s a lot of flexibility in how I view the images returned. I can choose to view lots of thumbnails on one page with no footer text on each image, and in doing so I can hover over each image to get the specifics I may like (such as the source, file size etc). It’s nice and clean, however, for those who do prefer to see that information instantly: by clicking a button it’s visible straight away. Nice work, Bing.
Rachel is account director at Elemental Communications
Media & PR expert
Tim Gibbon
Elemental Communications
Even with the massive advertising spend that Microsoft has invested in Bing, it hasn’t wooed me away from using the major engines (Ask, AOL and Yahoo) that I use, with Google (for now) being my main engine of choice. Billed as the decision engine, Bing isn’t the engine that I have as the de facto search client on my machine just yet and perhaps it may never be. I haven’t decided to use it further than occasionally testing whether it has improved the results it’s returning.
Although I use other products and services from the above engines – eg email, IM and I may make more use of the portal-like experiences from them – it’s still Google’s tools that I use most, and this has an impact upon the way I now search.
Even with Bing’s new approaches it’s not returning particularly useful for the in-depth and extremely targeted research I perform. Perhaps I should give Bing a longer shot to change what I’ve become accustomed to. Maybe it’s something that I should do during downtime, and not when I need my research results to be familiar and trustworthy.
It isn’t news that search algorithms work differently and are very closely guarded secrets, and maybe I should be more open to other providers, right? However, even though Bing isn’t proving useful for me right now, it is directing interesting traffic to some of the sites that we manage including the Social Media Portal that we created.
Google’s brand is incredibly strong and is synonymous with search, particularly with consumers and even with news presenters on major broadcast channels. Given this, Bing has a long way to go in to grabbing more market share where its challenges are more to do with its branding and profile, maybe not necessarily how its technology performs. I’m not imagining “Hey, have you ‘Binged it’ yet?” catching on to be popular any time soon, which is where Google’s kudos undeniably sits.
Although the rise of interest in part may be attributed to advertising, it appears that Microsoft still needs to flex its PR muscles and tell us Bing’s story so we warm to it, rather than corporate messaging through ads. The Microsoft and Yahoo on off, off on, on off, now back on again relationship may serve for both parties to launch a uniformed approach to search, but as with most things in this space, only time will tell. In the meantime, the search dominance crown belongs to another that without doubt is a specialist in communicating its brands.
Tim is director of Elemental Communications
Bookmark with:
Comments
Nik Thierry / 13/10/2009 / 18:38
Bing tells me I've spelled my name wrong when I search for myself (vain, but I was testing it). Even when I force it to look for the correct spelling of my name, the results are not very accurate (Google gets it right first time).
Bing wouldn't even find a website address - a client couldn't find themselves even if they put the exact URL of their site into the Bing search. We eventually found them on the 10th page of results. Google had the same result on page one, entry one - exactly where you would expect it.
I'm brand agnostic, and I'll try to use the best of whatever is out there - but Google wins the search war hands down (and don't get me started on the atrocity that was WolframAlpha - it failed to tell me what a collection of mice is called - Google got it first time). It's a Mischief of Mice by the way...
Eva DB / 16/10/2009 / 13:44 / http://www.defiscalisation-conseils.com
Bing.com has apparently hijacked my default IE 6 browser search, which I had reset to Google. It did this without my permission, or even notifying me specifically that this change in my software was being done. If Microsoft wants me to use their products, surely there must be a better way to convince me than to plant malware on my computer. Since I refuse to reward this sleazy kind of push loading/modification of software I will never use Bing, no matter how good it may turn out to be.
Design Manchester / 22/10/2009 / 09:22 / http://www.design-manchester.co.uk
I have noticed that Bing seems to put a lot more strength actual domain name. My domain is relatively new but it still ranks very well. You can see a good comparison here: http://www.bing-vs-google.com/. Bing I rank number 1 but in Google I am not even visible in the top 10 pages.
Guy Hoogewerf / 26/10/2009 / 19:15 / http://www.haxnicks.co.uk
I've tried Bing a little, but sorry to say it did not meet my (not very high) standards. Google remains king.
But here's the kicker that I feel is rather a shame. Bing is desparate to prove itself and innovating like mad, what this will mean is that Google will be forced to do the same (good for consumer you say) but I am not always sure that is right. In Bing innovate badly, and as per above many have said they like the 'related search' feature or the 'Video' feature - the Google will no doubt try to respond to that.
Probably by doing the same thing.
I'd infinitely prefer it if Google just let Bing die the slow death it needs to. In other words I hope that Google doesn't bother to try to extract what is essentially the little bits of okay stuff from the dedge that is Bing. That would not be good for consumers.
Simon / 23/11/2009 / 13:17 / http://www.berrypoint.co.uk
Not a fan of Bing. It lets me do something I can already do, but not as well (IMO). Maybe it will become a rival to Google in the future, but I can't see it.
