Bing It

So I’ve been using Bing, Microsoft’s decision engine (don’t call it a search engine!), for a couple weeks now. I’ve only used Google on my iTouch (since you can’t change the default search engine, and I’m too lazy to remember to go to bing.com), and I have to say, Microsoft may indeed have a winner on their hands.

What Bing does best is decision-based searches (travel, weather, medical, etc), rather than content-based searches. Searching for plane tickets not only directs you to the various travel sites, but will aggregate the results from those sites. You can narrow it down by departure/arrival dates, locations, price, and more. One particlarly nice feature of the travel search is that it will tell you the trend of the ticket price, so you know when best to purchase. In returning results like this, Bing sets itself apart from the typical Google search.

While they’ll never take out the giant that is Google, Bing’s search results have yielded better, more relevant results in most of the comparison searches I’ve done. It’s leaps and bounds better than Live Search (and MSN Search before that) ever was, and for those that make the effort to break the muscle-memory of Googling something, Bing is a great offering. Like many of Microsoft’s latest products (Zune, Windows 7, Live Essentials), Bing is pretty rock solid. There’s room for improvement, but there always is.

Google has grown stagnant with no serious competition, and I hope that Bing spurs them to make improvements to their search engine. If every 1% of the search market is worth $1 Billion dollars, then they don’t have to aim for taking down Google. In a world of Google, they have to not only match Google to gain traction, they have to be a better engine. What I find interesting is that they are not aiming squarely at Google; they are billing Bing as a decision engine, not a search engine, effectively carving out a niche market where they dominate. Do I ever think that people will throw the word “Bing” around like they do “Google”? No. It’ll be an odd day when you hear someone say “Just Bing it”, but I’m already Binging it. lol

Microsoft Security Essentials

Codenamed project Morro, the free successor to the popular Windows Live OneCare will be released for public beta on June 23rd. I’ve been using it under Windows 7 for several days now, and the experience is consistent and comfortable, requiring minimal user interaction for operations. It’s very hard to gauge the effectiveness of an anti-virus program, but so far, so good. I have to get any warnings or alerts from the application, though whether or not that’s an indicator of it’s effectiveness or my safe surfing habbits is up for debate. Short of intentionally contracting a virus on my system, I’m not quite sure how to test it. I will say that when coupled with Windows Defender and Firewall, I feel completely at ease; more so than I have with other alternatives (AVG Free, for example). Again, this is more due to my trust in Microsoft (don’t laugh) to protect than some smaller company. The UI needs a bit of work, in my opinion, to bring it up to the polish of Windows 7, but since you rarely have to interact with it (it’s constantly running in the background with schedule full scans, as one would expect), it’s not that much of a caveat. What is a bit of concern is that Microsoft is only insuring the product for $5 worth of damage if it does not work. As I never really read the TOS of other anti-virus programs, I’m not sure if this is on par or not. The TOS could change with a wide-release, so perhaps this is nothing to worry about. I eagerly await June 23rd to test the public beta release, and will update soon thereafter.