Wednesday, July 22, 2009

OT: Has Bing lost its Bling?

When Microsoft Bing was released I decided that I would set aside my instinctive avoidance of all things Evil and so I reset my home page from Google to Bing. After all, my major dislike for Microsoft is based on their abuse of their monopoly power (...and their marketing lies and their bad operating system and their Rip-and-Replace contempt for the customer etc. etc. but lets stick with abuse of monopoly power at the moment). Therefore it's a natural progression for me to now turn against the Google near-monopoly on Search and support the underdog.

Before you ask, I've just never felt good with Yahoo so they never got a chance in my choice of Search providers.

I'm now struggling with the temptation to reverse my decision. The problem is that Bing just doesn't have the reach of Google and when you're looking for esoteric technical information sometimes you're lucky to get half a dozen hits. Over the last few weeks I've found myself searching on Bing and then checking the results on Google... and Google invariably delivers more hits. I know that my personal strategy isn't going to count for zip in determining search market share and it's certainly costing me billable time to double check my results.

Maybe Bing has a search filter that is set to randomly ignore sites that talk about Lotus software. Maybe they just need to send out more bots. Either way, I think I'll be heading back to Google for a couple of months and give Bing a chance to build some bigger indexes.

Does anyone else use Bing to search for technical info? How do you find it compares to Google?
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1 comment:

Julian Buss said...

I tested Bing, too. But what many people don't know is that all the nice Bing features are available for the US Bing only, Bing in all other countries is a search engine, not much more.

I stick with Google, since Google still provides me with the best results.