| Skepticism of Bings Success Despite Being Fantastic |
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When it comes to Internet search, what does everyone think of? Google of course. Microsoft has set out to try to change that, but I just dont see it happening. Google has been in the search business for many years and they have simply done everything right. They have a simplistic interface with a very simple search that gets the job done quickly and easily. Ever since Google took over the #1 search engine spot, they have dominated in innovation and usage. On the other hand, Microsoft has been struggling to come up with a real search engine competitor. Prior to Bing, they had their search properties divided up into two products, MSN Search and Live Search. MSN Search has been around for many years and was the default search engine for the MSN.com site, but no one really ever used this because lets face it, no one really uses MSN at all. Live Search was created a short time ago as a part of Microsofts Windows Live services. Live.com was Microsofts portal to all of their Live services, such as Live Mail (formerly Hotmail), Live Messenger, etc. The highlight of the old Live.coms search was the daily image and thats about it. Once again, no one really used Live.com at all. One thing that Microsoft did get right that really helps them with Bing is theyve eliminated both MSN Search and Live Search and made it one thing, even though MSN.com is still its own separate online entity. Microsoft made the mistake of separating all of its services and almost made them work individually of each other and not integrated together, which is what Google does so well with all of its products. Microsoft also made the default search engine in Internet Explorer to be Bing.com, which helps its market share dramatically even though Internet Explorers usage numbers have dropped off to around 60%, which is horrible in the eyes of Internet market share. With Bing, Microsoft actually invented a very nice search platform (or what they would call, a decision engine, but I dont like that). I really like Bing as a search system because I like the categorized search results. For example, when I search for iPod with Bing, I get shopping results, buying guides, reviews, FAQs, downloads, and images. The search relevancy of Bings algorithm is quite accurate too, and Id rank it on the same level as Googles. Another neat feature is the flight face prediction feature that uses Farecast, which Microsoft acquired to predict the fare prices for airline tickets. When I search for DTW to PHX, Im presented with a graphic showing that fares are predicted to rise and I can click to see the current average fare and what it is predicted to be on a 30-day outlook. Recently, market share numbers show that Bing took around 1% of search traffic away from both Google and Yahoo. Its also predicted that Bings share will also increase over the near future, but it just wont last. After all the media coverage and analyzing is over and Microsofts ad campaigns run out, Bing will either lose ground or remain flat at wherever they are. All in all, I believe Bing is a better search engine than Google is by a long shot (and I like the pretty daily pictures as well), however, I dont believe it will overtake Google by any means. I even changed my default home page in Firefox to Bing.com and after a week, I changed it back to Google. You just cant simply swoop in and change what is engraved in all of our minds. - Alex Gasparski, Editor-in-Chief of TechReviewSource.com What search engine do you use and why? I'd like to hear your thoughts in the comments below. |
