Have you tried Bing yet? You know, that new Microsoft search engine, powered (and advertised for) by Microsoft?
Why Microsoft thinks we need another old school web search engine is beyond me. With Web 3.0 about to bloom, and real-time search making it’s entrance, showing up sporadically as we speak, how could they possibly think that there is a market? WIth all the big bloggers raving about the real-time web every other day, why would anyone endeavor to fill a niche that Google beat to death a decade ago?
Ironically, finding this image on Bing.com was not as easy as you’d think, I had to refine the search and scroll pretty far to find it.
That being said, Microsoft is doing a pretty decent job. As a standard text search it doesn’t do anything new, it’s basically just Google with a new logo. It’s supposed to have all these nifty features, but they just don’t show up. I’m thinking maybe they only work in Internet Explorer, which is just a childish decision if that turns out to be the case, but neither google nor Bing provides any kind of fast confirmation. Supposedly, Bing will categorize your search results, pull up online stores when you’re searching for a product, look up reliable medical info, etc. Sadly, as far as I can tell, this is not the case. Simply put, none of the features touted are actually available (at least not to mac users).
However, I still love Bing. “But why, Burnie? Don’t you use a mac?” Yup, I sure do, and since I do, I have a very good wallpaper thing going, where it changes my wallpaper every 5 seconds. This means I need a large amount of wallpapers to keep things from getting repetitive, and Bing gives me just that! A steady supply of walls! Now, 4scrape already does a splendid job of that, but their search function is rubbish, where Microsoft’s is gold. Bing has one very amazing feature, which I use all the time: It lets you categorizes your image searches by size (small, medium, large, wallpaper), style, colour, and layout! Oh, and there’s a people function, but it’s largely useless as it doesn’t work properly.
This comes up if you search for Bing UK. I don’t know that doesn’t even
I’ll keep this short. I love the… Wow. As I was typing that sentence, I headed over to Bing to get another picture, the one that you see right over this text, and suddenly some new stuff is working. I don’t know what they did, they’re probably monitoring me, although that’s not my area of expertise, but the main point is, now the web search function is actually marginally less useless than it was at the beginning of this post! I went to the UK site, wondering if there was some racism going on, and now even the .com site thinks I’m from the UK, so I guess there was, but whatever, stuff works. The categorizing still doesn’t do much, mostly it just pulls up the “news” category no matter what I search for, but at least now it shows some promise!
Does it stand a chance against Google? No. Does it do anything new? No. Is it good? Yes, it’s good, but it doesn’t matter. Google is not going anywhere, and Microsoft is basically just spending a lot of money advertising for a new old product on a static market. It’s a bad business move, unless Microsoft decides to introduce real-time search to Bing some time very soon, and even then they’re not first, since Collecta launched today! So go check that out at
Collecta.com! It’s a bit on the slow side, but at least they’re innovating! Maybe it’s just me, but I like a little bit of pause button with my search engine.
Song of the Blog: Everything’s Magic
Sincerely yours
Bjørn
