I am going to interject a little of my own opinion of the Bing vs. Google debate.
I found a website yesterday named Blind Search that I thought was fun to play with. It’s like the Pepsi blind taste test except with search engines instead of carbonated drinks. Type in a search term. The results will be in three columns. You choose the column that, in your opinion, provide better results. Once you choose, it tells you if you chose Google, Bing, or Yahoo. I played with it for about half an hour and didn’t pick Google once.
Does that mean I’m going to use a different search engine? Absolutely not. Let’s face it. All search results are going to be about the same. The results may not be in the same order, but they are there somewhere. The results aren’t the issue in my opinion.
When we go to a search engine, our goal is to search for something. We need information. We need to find the information and the search engine helps us do that.
If you go to Yahoo, there all all kinds of distractions on there. I am there to search for something and I don’t want the see the latest news headlines, puzzles, horoscopes, a couple dozen misc links on the left, and advertisements. I want to search. Even the “new” Yahoo homepage is pretty much the same as the current one but without the grey title bar over each of the sections.
Bing is a lot more simplified than Yahoo, but their functionality is more annoying to the user. Their homepage actually looks pretty nice. The problem I see with the Bing homepage uses Silverlight. I want to search. I don’t want to install a plugin and restart my browser. Stop trying to force Silverlight on everyone, Microsoft. And the big kicker for me is Bing keeps asking me to prove that I am not a bot. So I have to constantly keep filling out there captcha forms. This is really annoying because a) I am here to search for something, not prove I am a human being, and b) Microsoft needs to determine whether I am a bot on their end using code. It shouldn’t be my responsibility.
I searched for “why is there a dead pakistani on my couch” which is a line from the show Lost. Bing returned nothing useful. Not even a video. Google returned the video on YouTube and sites saying where it came from. I’m going to stick with Google. Google does exactly what I want it to do and, being a search engine, it gets me to what I need to search… the search form.
BTW, I heard a humor that Bing is actually an acronym that means “Because It’s Not Google.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it if it, that’s pretty funny.
