bing.com, No Challenge to Goggle

It is always hard to try to unseat an incumbent be it in the political arena or in business. This is especially the case when the product or service has become part of the lexicon. A great example of this is found in Mircosoft’s renewed campaign to unseat Google as the leading online search engine. Using TV and print advertising, the computer giant is touting bing.com as everyman’s search engine.

There are and have been many challengers to Google over the years. Microsoft and others have invested millions in R&D and advertising only to throw in the towel and change the name a few times. Others survive but barely. Remember “AskJeves.com” now just “Ask.com?”

I did some searching on Google and bing to see what differences I would find. What I found is that there are two big differences and I don’t like either.

When you first sign on to bing.com you are greeted with a very colorful screen with a beautiful picture and fancy buttons. For me that is nice, but just as I really don’t care what my hammer looks like when I am pounding nails, I don’t need eye candy when I am doing a search. Save the beautiful pictures for Facebook..

The second “feature” that I find irritating is Mircosoft’s continued insistence on “helping” me do things. Using some set of arcane algorithms, many Microsoft programs decide what you want to do and then “help” you do it. While you can turn these features off, I still find myself working on a document in MS Word fighting the programs format functions. I don’t need help and if I see that cute animated paper clip one more time I am going to go nuts. I found the same “helps” in bing.

As for actual searching, bing does OK. I found some strange results but essentially the same results came back for searches in Google and bing. The difference was that bing tried to figure out what you really wanted and listed the results accordingly.

I for one will stay with Google. While “bing” is indeed part of the lexicon, I think it will stay that way because of the song “White Christmas” and not for its ability to look up the meaning of “white” or “Christmas.”