To Bing or not to Bing
August 7, 2009 by Isaac
Background
For most tasks that I do Linux is by far my choice. I am not necessarily a Microsoft basher, as I believe that they definitely have their place in the world and in large have made the computing industry a better place. However, I was skeptical and did give an eye roll when I first heard about Bing, Microsoft's new "decision engine." To be fair I decided to change my default search engine for one week from Google to Bing. I changed my home page and the search provider in the Firefox search bar. Here are my impressions:
Home Page
| Bing | 1 |
| 0 |
There is a certain appeal to the sparse Google home page. I am an engineer and I love things that are straight to the point. So, Google appeals to me on that front. However, the Bing home page managed to be beautiful and sparse at the same time. To me it looks as if Bing stole the Google home page layout and then rearranged it slightly and added a background picture and some useful information. I must say that I am surprised by my decision on this one. I have been a huge fan of the to-the-point Google home page from day one. Sorry Google, but I really like the Bing home page.
Maps
| Bing | 1 |
| 0 |
Surprising to me this one goes to Bing. Not only is their presentation better, but the speed is much faster. For the last several months Google maps has been really slow in loading. I've talked to several people who have noticed the same thing. For what seems like forever Google Maps gets stuck on "loading..." for minutes. OK, I'm sure it's not minutes, but it feels like it.
When Google maps first came out they were so far ahead of Mapquest, the then standard for maps, that it was amazing. Unfortunatly, it seems that the maps have not continued to be the subject of much active development.
As far as presentation goes, I love the smooth zooming of the maps. It just seems so fluid in comparison to Google. Also, the "birds eye" view is a really nice touch and I just can't get by without it now. Good job Microsoft.
Shopping
| Bing | 1 |
| 0 |
I admit that I don't use the shopping feature very often, but from the few searches I've done I like the results in Bing better. The presentation of the results is far less confusing. What Bing does that I think makes it shine is they seem to group results by items and then to find the list of retailers you drill down into the item. Google presents all items from all retailers and I just get lost.
Search Results
| Bing | 0 |
| 1 |
Finally, we get to web search results. This is the feature I consider most important. After all, why do people visit these sites? To find information.
Although I like the way the information is shown in Bing their page ranking/searching algorithm falls short of Google. For many searches Bing shows useful results. However, too many times this last week I've had to revert back to using Google to find something. In the end these are portals to find information so although Google loses out in other categories this one carries far more weight.
Two of the searches in particular that dissapointed me are:
- findbugs
- perforce
I also tried variations and related searches with these and couldn't get the results I wanted. For example, when I searched for "findbugs" in Bing I got a bunch of pages that were about FindBugs, but not the home page. Just now I tried this search again and the home page is the top result, so their page ranking algorithm must have done some learning since I first tried. Another search term that gave me problems was "perforce." Now, I happen to know that the home page is perforce.com, but I wanted to see what Bing said. To my surprise it shows everything but the home page in the search results. There is the wikipedia article about them and a blog and even an Apache Ant task, but no link to perforce.com. So, I try the same thing in Google and get what I expect. Unfortunately, I didn't write down all of my failed Bing searches, but there were several where I ended up resorting to Google for help.
Conclusion
I don't use most of the other features of Google or Bing like news, videos, or images, so I didn't comment on them. Overall I like many things about Bing and will probably continue to use it for many tasks and searches. However, for the time being they still can't touch the search results from Google and until they improve their search ranking algorithm I'm going to have to stick with Google.
Posted in Technology
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