Google vs Bing - which will you use?
My Twitter feed is starting to get a heap of activity about bing, Microsoft's new search engine, so I thought I better check it out. There's an interesting conversation going on over at Robert Scoble's friendfeed - must be great to have so many connections - but even with all the opinion going on, it's still good to kick the tyres yourself. On launching bing in my browser I was presented with a great image of Santorini and now I just want to go on holidays there. I tried a couple of searches and the first thing I noticed was the speed - its 'google-like'! It's also great to have a nice, clean, simple search interface, unlike some of the horrendous offerings on some of the portals that are seen as competitors to Google. I have only tried a few searches so its hard to comment with authority on the quality of the search results but they seem generally ok in the same way that Google's are generally ok. Context is still an issue for these search engines. Try doing a search on 'bing' and you will see what I mean. At the time I tested Google seemed to have better search results for me than Bing did when I used 'bing' as the search term. Next thing I noticed was the lack of ads down the right side which was a big plus for me. However, that was when I searched for 'eportfolio', a keen interest of mine. When I then searched for 'bing' there was a sponsored link at the top of the search results, and it was for something totally irrelevant to me (sorry Bing Lee whoever you are and whatever you are trying to sell on eBay). Ads can be annoying but when they are totally irrelevant and in a prominent position they can be really irritating. Some work to do there I think - at least its all Beta so it has a ready made excuse. There is an attempt at providing some context through related search suggestions (down the left side) but no joy there at all for the afore mentioned 'bing' search if you are interested in Microsoft Bing. Google also has some really cool ways of displaying results now (discussed previously here) that Bing doesn't match. So what else does it offer? There are a number of links to other Microsoft related services such as Windows Live and ninemsn. The latter one is a bit of a turn-off for me as I really don't like using a search engine provided by a major (in this part of the world) traditional media outlet. This is one of the main reasons I don't use the local Yahoo! offering unless I am getting no joy on other search engines. When I compare the various menu options available from Google and Bing I probably get to the real reason why it will be difficult for me to switch search engines from Google to Bing. I am a user of a number of Google's other services and it is just too convenient for me to have Google as not just my default search engine, but my default home page in my browser. This is going to be a real challenge to Microsoft - how do you convince people to switch search engines to you when it's not just search that people are invested in? I guess if you are a Windows Live user then this decision would look quite different. Unfortunately for me at the moment there doesn't seem to be a really compelling reason to switch search engines but I am really hoping that someone, maybe Microsoft with Bing, can offer some serious competition in the search marketplace.
