Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying out the Bing search engine instead of my usual Google. Bing is Microsoft’s revamp of Live Search, which was its revamp of MSN search.
I’ve never really liked Microsoft’s offering to the search engine industry, mainly because I don’t like its online presence. I hate MSN, I hated hotmail, I don’t like Live mail. I think they are all inferior products, and I really can’t understand why people don’t make the switch to Google’s online products. Up until now I would never have given Microsoft’s search engine another look, but I don’t like things staying the same for too long so I thought I’d give it a spin.
Firstly, I think Bing is much prettier than Google. They have a new background image every day, and the whole design is obviously more deliberate than Google’s 1990s colour scheme. I appreciate that. I never liked Google’s boring logo, nor its ugly results page.
Also, the images search function is light years ahead of Google’s. With Google you get 20 pages of about 100 image thumbnails that you have to laboriously scroll through. With Bing you get a sidebar of thumbnails which is refreshed with Ajax. You never have to leave the page, and you can still view all of the thumbnails it finds. I like the efficiency, convenience and cleverness of it.
They’ve copied Google’s novelty logo idea. Google puts up a special image for Christmas, New Years’ and special occasions, like famous scientists’ birthdays. There the focus is on learning more about, e.g., the famous scientist. With Bing, it’s more about you using their search engine, which I don’t like. It’s a sneaky way of promoting yourself by promoting someone else. It’s funny to see how deep that runs in Microsoft. They’ve resisted web standards, preferring instead to release their own proprietary codes, right up until IE7. I really hate this tendency in Microsoft.
As for what was going through their heads when they called it Bing, I can only hazard a guess. It’s a dreadful, awful name. Interesting to see that they’re stepping away from all their other branding (Microsoft, MSN, Windows, Live, etc).
I hate, and will always hate, multimap. This is probably irrational, much like my hatred of Yahoo. And there’s video adverts on the main page. I hate video adverts.
As for the quality of its search results — obviously the most important thing — I haven’t really looked into it all that much. I guess my expectations in that area are mostly unconscious ones, so I’ll continue to do side-by-side comparisons for a while till I find out what I prefer.
So far, Bing doesn’t feel like proper searching yet. I must confess I don’t really care. (It’s not exactly the most hugely important question in life, is it.) What wins is whatever works easiest. Bing is pretty and excellent with images and media, but has a dreadful name. Google has a boring design, but it’s familiar.
It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out in the long run. My personal prediction is that in a year or so they’ll have another rebrand (they’re on their fourth as it is). We’ll be introduced to “Swish”, or some other equally silly name, but unless they do something fundamental to searching online muchbetter than Google it will fail to raise much interest.
Maybe pay people every time they use Bing. And change that wretched name!