I, like many people, viewed the Bing marketing video last week, which promised not to create a search engine, but to create a ‘decision engine’ – if you winced at this blatant attempt at the ‘game changing switcheroo’, congratulations, you can join me on the ‘jaded technology observer’ bench. Despite my distaste at having to swim through the murky waters of marketing blurb in this video, the demonstration looked pretty nice – showing how the ‘decision engine’ picks out flight details, product reviews and other things out of your search terms and provides context-sensitive recategorisations such as price and specifications of digital cameras if that’s what you were searching for etc. I could definitely see a use for that sort of thing, provided the ‘decision’ part of the engine didn’t get too zealous, start finding unintended patterns, and obscuring the regular search results.
Now that I’ve had a few minutes to play with the real thing today, I needn’t have worried. Because it seems that despite what I type in to the search engine, it just gives me regular search results – even if I try to recreate some of the examples in the demo from last week, like searching for digital cameras. Is the ‘decision’ part of the engine just turned off right now? Because as it stands, what I see is a pretty competent Google rip-off, which technically is no mean feat, but the world doesn’t need another Google. We already have one.
Maybe someone will flip a switch and it’ll suddenly start doing the magical things the marketing video talked about.
Edit: ok, I see that the filtering and review features are in the Shopping section, but Google has these in it’s own Shopping section too. Someone tell me, exactly what is Bing doing that Google hasn’t been for the last several years? Am I just blind to the genius of the ‘decision engine’?
June 1st, 2009 at 1:54 pm
“the world doesn’t need another Google. We already have one.”
Can’t agree there. The almost total dominance of Google in search, although well earned by being by far the best at it, is not healthy. I would like there to be at least several more Googles. On the other hand, I don’t want any of them to involve Microsoft in any way, so I am giving this Bing thing a wide berth.
June 1st, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Sure – competition is good. But just copying the incumbent isn’t introducing competition either; people don’t switch because you mirrored what they already had from someone else that already works (see Linux on the desktop). Where’s the differential? The only way you can get away with just copying is if you offer a significant price difference, but that’s irrelevant in search (for the non-advertiser anyway).
That’s what I mean by we don’t need another Google. To compete, it needs to be something better than Google. Or at least different. Bing right now feels like a reskinned Google with clunkier maps. It’s only beta of course, and the video promised much more than this, so let’s give them more time on it, but so far I’m underwhelmed.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Is there somewhere I could view the Bing presentation? I also don’t get how different Bing is to Google.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Not sure, it was only up before the service launched. I don’t seem to be able to find it anymore, even on Bing’s own video search
August 6th, 2009 at 8:11 am
my initial test result shows that Bing is as good as Google when displaying relevant search results. Google might be having a tough competitor with Microsofts own search engine.
August 22nd, 2009 at 10:08 am
Microsoft Bing would be the closet competitor of Google. but i still use Google because it shows more relevant results on the serp.
September 11th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Bing search engine gives almost the same search results as Google. Looks like Google will now have a tough competition when it comes to search engine technology.
October 21st, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Bing does give search results much like Google but i would have to say that Google still gives more relevant search results.