Lee Ferree

Many of my friends have been asking me what I think about Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. With numerous television commercials, even the computer illiterate have heard about Bing. In addition, NBC’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” features a game where selected audience members use Microsoft Bing to play for prizes. With all the hype, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of Bing vs Google to see how Bing really stacks up.

Just to start, Bing is a major improvement over its predecessor, Microsoft Live Search. Searching is far more intuitive and results are easily sortable.

There seems to be fewer parked sites containing ads, which is one thing that’s always drove me bananas with Google.

Shopping results in Bing are similar to what Google already offers.

Hovering over a search result to get detailed site info is a nice touch. It’s something we’ll surely see in Google’s future.

Video previewing is also nice. Moving your cursor over a video thumbnail will begin playing the embedded video. Other than that, Google offers the same functionality, while Grid View is a few extra clicks.

I’ve also noticed official sites of companies and celebrities being pushed to the top of search, as they should be. But I’m afraid this is what brings me to the downside of Bing…

What if you’re not a famous celebrity or aren’t the owner of a large corporation? Where will you show up on Bing? Will you show up at all??

While searching for some of the lesser known sites (including my own), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that Bing is somehow not crawling them. You may want to submit your site to Bing, along with your “sitemap.xml” if you’re not showing up. I’m not sure how well this works and when you’ll notice results. The search algorithms of Bing and Google are clearly different.

Bing is still the new kid on the block when it comes to search engines. We’ll just have to sit back and see how it plays out. I’m not compelled to make the switch to Bing at this time, but I said that about Google 10 years ago.