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