Bing: Could it be the next Google?

So Bing is out, will it be the next great search engine? Only time will tell.  But at least you can decide for yourself whether or not you like it.

Even though Bing is not completely live yet, Web surfers can still test the interface to get acquainted with it.  Unlike Google’s ultra-simplistic homepage, Bing’s homepage changes each day, with a new background of some picturesque location. There are a number of trivia questions regarding the location of the background integrated directly into the background.  These trivia questions redirect the person reading them to the various Bing applications such as, Maps, Videos, Images and News; a sort of devious advertisement of Bing’s search features.  As for the layout, Bing is very user-friendly, boasting a suggested search list on the left-hand side as well as a recent search history displayed right there on the homepage.

After playing around for a bit I decided to search five terms in both Bing and Google to see how similar the search results were.  The first search was “auto repair Atlanta” which yielded about a 75% overlap in like search results.  Second was “skiing in Colorado” which yielded the exact same first result and again each search engine had about 7 of the other 9 results in common with one another.  The third term I searched for was “steakhouses in Boston.”  The two search engines had 8 of 10 local listings in common with each other.  These three search queries all have a common thread; they are local searches.  Bing appears to be as effective for local search as Google.

In order to fully gauge Bing’s search capability, I performed a couple of more generalized searches.  The first general search was for “airline deals.”  The first search result was the same, Orbitz.com, but that was the only one that the two search engines had in common.  I then searched for “mortgage refinancing” which generated one like search result, GMAC.com.  With these varied search results it became clear that Bing’s search algorithm was fundamentally different from Google’s.

Even Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak praised Bing after anticipating a lousy release, “I mainly wanted to see if it was lousy off the bat, but it seemed very nice.”  (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=4045)  The main point that Wozniak makes, and that many other early adopters have made, is that it will take at least a month before the online community forms an opinion on effective Bing is compared to Google.

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