Microsoft recently launched Bing, a search rival to Google, making people wonder whether it’s worth it to make the switch. Putting lots of dollars into advertising and a mega “chess move” of a deal with yahoo, Microsoft hopes Bing will cut a large chunk out of Google’s search dominance.
Should I use Bing? How do I know if it’s better than Google? Well, I am here to answer that.
Some people have a bitter distaste for Microsoft and don’t like Bing purely on principle. As if Vista was created as a practicle joke on them personally. Others see Google growing to fast for it’s heart, losing the “Do No Evil” mantra once adopted at Google HQ. These folks are happy to see some healthy competition. There are many opinons and reviews out there and most are not worth their weight in kilobytes.
The best option is to test every search engine for a generous period of time. Totally immerse yourself in each search engine. Make sure your homepage is switched, change the default search for your internet browser, and don’t forget about media searches like pictures and video. Bing handles media searches in a much different way than Google. You don’t have to click on a new page to see more image results, you just scroll down for more pictures. For videos, Bing allows you to preview the results by mousing over the thumbnail to trigger a quick animation of the video, including the audio. Are these good or bad features? I can come up with pros and cons for each but I will leave that for a separate article. (AIM/IChat: mrzubi if you want to discuss it.)
Another great way to find the right search engine is to use BlindSearch, which lets you conduct a blind study, or taste test, if you will. You enter a search query and three columns of results appear. You pick the column that you believe delivers the best results and then it reveals which search engine belongs to which column. This is an amazing way to pick a search engine but make sure to search more than one term before making a decision. I picked Google three times, Bing once, depending on different searches. Also important is that this is purely delivering text results. For comprehensive media searches you will need to test each site separately, for the time being.
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I’m suer Bing is better than Google for shopping, but far to menny adds.