Bing, Will You Bother?

While I am impressed with Microsoft’s Bing search engine it lags Google in Blog and news searches, and is not as accurate as evidenced by it returning screen-scraped versions of original content instead of filtering these results like Google does. Still, the search engine is good and if Google ranks a 9/10 then Bing is 7.5 or so based on my searches to date.

It is worth mentioning that Bing is doing a good job spidering the web but still doesn’t seem to do this as quickly as Google in many cases. On a positive note, yesterday I wrote a blog entry with the term “packet triplication” in it. Prior to posting I noticed Google had very few pages with the term in its results. Today both Bing and Google have my blog entry with this term on their first pages for searches on this term. Interestingly Google ranks my entry as the #1 result while Bing ranks my entry and my blog home page as #3 and #2 respectively.

Microsoft’s search challenge of course is not just search quality but their brand. Are they MSN, Microsoft, Live or Bing? It is worth pointing out that if you enter live.com into your browser it takes you to Bing. So you might think Live is dead. But no… Enter mail.live.com and you are taken to the Live email sign-in page. If it is confusing for me and I am researching the matter, how will the typical consumer make sense of it all? If the company can stop changing names and confusing the market for a few years, Bing could actually take market share from Google.

But it will take time.

Yesterday Bing had an Alexa rank in the 500 range (1 being the best ranking) and this was down from the multimillion range in the prior week. Today it has dropped to 1,070 which is a sign that people checked out the search engine and then went back to using Google.

Bing’s Alexa ranking is dropping (getting higher/doing worse) after less than a week

bing-alexa-rank.jpg

Still, old habits die hard and it will take many years for a significant amount of users to switch to Bing and if it isn’t better than Google the question many will ask is why even bother?

  • Grant Neate
    June 3, 2009 at 8:49 pm

    While I am not a fan of Google and the way they sometimes operate but I use them all the time – yes old habits do die hard.

  • rey
    August 16, 2009 at 1:34 am

    I am not fan of google either. But I think they are becoming a leader.

  • Noureen
    August 31, 2009 at 7:18 am

    Rey, I think you are right.

  • Joshan
    September 5, 2009 at 6:20 pm

    Google has a special place for me. My wife business is all about google, and she spends around 3000 per month for advertising. Go Google Go.

  • Noureen
    September 14, 2009 at 9:07 am

    Bing 2.0 release,
    The next version of Bing is quite impressive and will be released in the near future. In fact, two of the corporation’s employees have indicated on Twitter that Bing 2.0 should come out within the next 20 (or maybe even 7) days.
    Last Friday (Sep. 11th), Microsoft held a large employee meeting at a baseball stadium in Seattle. Monte Enbysk, a senior editor of Microsoft Office Live, tweeted following a demo there, “Bing 2.0, out this month, has some exciting new features. Imagine seeing maps plus pics from the neighborhood of a restaurant to try.”

  • Sherri
    October 19, 2009 at 10:09 pm

    I like Bing more than Google search engine. I think Bing has something going for it. Intelligence is what Google needs which Bing has to offer.

  • evlilik yıldönümü hediyesi
    November 22, 2009 at 9:19 am

    Google has a special place for me. My wife business is all about google, and she spends around 3000 per month for advertising

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