Bing has been on a major push over the last couple of months promoting the Bing decision engine as a viable alternative to Google. Fellow professionals appear to have taken a Marmite stance to Bing, some love it, others hate it myself – I would have to unfortunately sit myself still in Camp Google.
Some of this may be done to familiarity with Google. It gives me what I want, when I want and often how I want. Take for example the snippet below
Compare this against similar results on Google and there is a stark difference between the two, and something that in my opinion highlights very well the differences in quality of results between the two search engines. The Google search results provide far more disclosure and relevancy than the Bing results do – something which I feel the addition of Microformats to the Google armoury will continue to provide this usability advantage to the likes of Google over Bing and to a lesser extent Yahoo.
However that said I do like the potential of Bing. Searches such as ‘plasma tv’ highlight they are able to pull similar content elements out to Google. There are a number of nice touches to the interface but one has to feel they still have a long way to go before the Bing system is as intuitive and/or powerful as that of Google. However, this was always a long term project for Microsoft, their first objective was to beat Yahoo – something they achieved before the proposed timescales – and the deal with Yahoo has allowed them to now focus exclusively on taking that market share from Google.
The new bout of advertising is going to draw some people to Bing, however there is no doubting that the major factor to change search engines will be relevancy and usability. Dom Hodgson from Think Visibility put this very well recently at the Sascon Search Marketing and Social Media Conference when he highlighted many people try Bing but go back to Google as they are used to using it.
It would appear breaking this type of behaviour is going to be the hardest to do…
