It may not be perfect, But It’s Not Google… this is the Microsoft stand on the new search engine, named Bing… www.bing.com.  Check it out. I think you will enjoy the experience.

On June 1, Microsoft released a new search engine to compete with Google. Microsoft’s Bing search engine is marketed to be more than just a search engine, but a “decision engine”. Bing’s goal is to surface information you’re looking for faster than Google does by providing the most relevant information to the top of the listing that is returned from a search. How they determine the most relevant is the cause for debate with some.

Reports indicate that approximately 25% of searches are not satisfactory to the searcher. I can agree with this as I am not a big fan of getting 4 million hits based on my keywords and then having to search to find something relevant. Even after refining my keywords, I can still be buried in links to wade through. Information overload is a growing issue and is being addressed by more and more companies….remember the report we ran a few weeks ago on chacha.com?

Bing is initially designed to provide a much richer search experience for people looking for information in four categories: shopping, travel, health and local businesses. I used the engine the other day while performing the same search on Google and then on Bing. Bing presented categorized the information for me during my searches which I liked. For example, when searching on Home Depot with Bing, I get a category of Home Depot jobs and related links, then a category of Home Depot Coupons and related links and so on. The user experience is pleasing and the callouts for each link were nice. All I had to do was mouse over a link to get more information.

When searching on plane flights, I get specific links to specific deals on Bing. Bing also provided me with a forecast on what the most likely trend would be with the fare that I was searching which I found very helpful.

As you can imagine, some people like the engine and some people don’t. A bit of a surprise is that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is a fan. On the other end, people don’t like the “big brother” aspect of Microsoft bringing what they think is the most relevant information to the top of the listing… sort of a “Who is Microsoft to decide” this type of issue.

In another effort to drive searching, people can get cash back when they buy products from certain merchants that have a Bing symbol displayed next to their links. Click on shopping on the www.bing.com and see the cash back listings.

The world of search is still very new and all the engines are working to optimize your searching. If these new features with Bing turn out to be popular, then Google will most likely just incorporate them in to their engine. In either case, I am glad to see the focus on improving searching for information.

Tags: Apple, Bing, bing.com, ChaCha, Google, Home Depot, Larry Fiorino, Microsoft, search, search engine, Steve Wozniak

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Tech Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.