My Week with Bing

Switching to Bing (MSFT) for a week had no meaningful impact on my internet experience, either positively or negatively. I was able to find most of what I was looking for with Bing and I enjoyed the experience. That said, I found no reason to switch from Google (GOOG) and I am returning to my practice of relying on Google as my primary search engine.

Here's some high level thoughts:

• Bing's image search is an improvement over Google's. When I look for an image, in the past, I would go to Flickr first and Google second. In the future, I'll go to Flickr first and Bing second.
• Bing doesn't know about social media. If you search Joanne Wilson on Google, my wife's Gotham Gal blog is the first result. If you search Joanne Wilson on Bing, it's not even on the first page.
• Bing's search results feel less "real time" than Google's, probably as a result of the lack of news links. This is an area both need to work on.
• There's a lot less paid links in Bing's service than Google's. I view that as a bad thing although many will view that as a good thing. On many ecommerce searches, I prefer the paid links over the organic links, which are often spammed up.

Our portfolio company, Clickable, which offers an easy to use front end to search and keyword ad buying for small businesses, did something similar last week and published their thoughts on the Clickable blog. They were more analytical in their analysis than me but came to pretty much the same conclusions.

That's my quick take. I'd love to hear all of yours.

Comments

[Jeanne Klem...:]

Fred, I decided to take up your suggestion and give Bing a try for a week.

At first I really liked it, found it to be very 'clean' in terms of layout, and it invariably had what I was looking for in the first or second result. Then after a couple of days, I started to notice the down-side. Bing felt less 'intelligent' than Google, and more static. Like you, I missed News and social media results, and I also missed Google's suggested alternatives, which are useful when you're not sure of a spelling.

I didn't last the week...by Friday I was back with Google.

Jun 22 08:02 AM

[tedstr:]

Fred,

After less than a week I would agree with you. A couple of thoughts.

My favorite fuctionalities like getting quotes from a stock symbol, getting flight status from flight numbers, finding data, replacement parts, or accessories for obscure home elctronics or other home repair work all seem to have yielded similar results.

Ambiguous product or corporate names seemed to work well when searching for brands, proper names appeared first.

Bing does not appear to have crawled LinkedIn as deeply. Everything related to no-so-famous people, as you pointed out does not appear as deep. Spell check was absent with some interesting results for some commonly misspelled famous names. My own background from LInkedIn or elsewhere did not show up except for a position I held 9 years ago on a directory site I had never heard of.

Which may be MSFT's biggest issue. Our media choices, and web search is a media choice not a technology choice, is so much driven by perception and perceptions can be formed by very minor differences particulalry when the switching cost is zero and the behaviors are repeated dozens of times a day.

After a while of ever-so-slightly less accurate, slightly less precise, results, a little voice kept saying "I know I would have found that first at Google. No cash lost. No bad feelings. No warranty repairs. Just my time.

Good luck with that MSFT.

Jun 22 10:49 AM