I’m exploring Microsoft’s latest effort in the search category, Bing. As there has been a number of articles, and some ads touting its features, I felt it was time to give it a test-drive. M$ has learned from Google. The interface is nice and clean, very much like Google’s. Currently, they have a lovely background of Normandy. This is filled with hyperlinks to D-Day topics, but done in a rather unobtrusive way.
Anyway, the main thing to check is search. For my first effort, I decided to try and find a BusinessWeek article that I’d just read and wanted to seed to Newsvine. My search terms were the title of the article (“Microsoft’s Search Savior”) with “BusinessWeek”. In Bing, sadly, the article didn’t appear in the first page of results. Google had the article as it’s first link. Trying a vanity search, I find my LinkedIn profile first, followed by my main website, Setzers.org second. Not too bad. I do like the list on the left side with related searches.
In the end, I’m not really wowed. I will continue to use this for a little while and see how it “sticks”. Anyway, the best thing about this is the media attention, which should drive Google to accelerate their innovation.