Microsoft’s new search engine goes Bing!
June 18, 2009
BY What’s that in Google’s rear view mirror? The answer is Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. To be sure, the information highway is littered with examples of defeated search engines that have challenged Google’s relative monopoly on the search engine scene. Whether it was an engine that was too slow, returned irrelevant results, or just plain didn’t present information in a useful manner, Google has pretty much crushed the competition, achieving icon status on the internet as well being recognized as a verb in it’s own right.
Bing is the first search engine in quite some time that actually has a chance of going toe-to-toe with Google. It’s just as fast, provides all of the same functionality, image, video, map searches, shopping, and pretty much everything else that Google provides. It also comes with some neat functions that Google doesn’t currently provide on their basic search page (iGoogle can be configured many different ways but isn’t intuitive for less tech savvy users). Bing will register your relative location when you enter a search — for example, Google “traffic” and you get lists of websites that monitor traffic. However, if you Bing “traffic” and the first thing that pops up is a live traffic map of your area showing the traffic conditions of the major roads in the region.
When you do a search in Google, it will offer alternatives if you mistype or misspell a word. Bing provides the most common alternative searches in a left justified column regardless of mistype or misspellings (it offers alternatives as well if you botched a word). Overall, Bing offers more tools on the search result pages that can save time when you’re trying to find something.
It should be said that the differences in the engines is pretty slim, a huge compliment to Bing. Many have challenged the throne and have ended up as punch lines in technology circles (Ask Jeeves anyone? Which failed so hard it had to be rebranded). Will Bing unseat Google? Probably not, considering the popularity Google has achieved, but it serves notice that the bar Google has set isn’t as high to the competition anymore. And as the ace up their sleeves, Microsoft will work hard to integrate Bing with future Microsoft products, which run on a pretty big chunk of the world’s computers.
Related stuff:
Google adds Creative Commons image search
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