Bing… The Sound of Search
I’ve held off writing about Microsoft’s new search engine because when it was first released in June it seemed to be premature to write an article about something that I’d not used myself.
My first impressions of Bing were (and still are) “Wow, the photos look amazing”. The cleanness of the interface is great; I like the simplicity of it. However upon further inspection I can’t help thinking Bing has a long way to go before it takes over from Google.
The search results for simple queries such as ‘Plumber Leicester’ give results that seem to be based on domain name rather than the content of the site. The number 1 site has almost no content whatsoever, except a bit of spammy stuff in the footer and some lists about what the company do. The second listing has been suspended by BT (or hacked?), the third listing is Freeindex (a directory). All pretty useless.
search results in Bing
Compared to Google’s results for the same query this seems like stepping back in time. Yes, there are some of the same search results in both lists, but the first search result in Google has more copy on the page, and although the site isn’t a complicated one, it tells a potential customer far more about the company and what they do that Bing’s number one listing.
Search Results in Google
All this leads me to believe that Microsoft needs to work a lot harder to get the core of their service right before rolling out extras such as the shopping search and xRank. Google have built up their products over time, and their search results are on the whole the best. I really want Bing to do well, because it is unhealthy for any industry to have just one major player, as we have at the moment with Google. But, until the competition bring out something that works as well as Google, or even better than them, then I don’t really think Google have much to worry about just yet.
