Readers will know that I’m usually very dismissive of Microsoft, but I have to give them credit where it’s due, and my (very brief) experiments with their new search engine, Bing, suggest that it does rather a good job. As good as Google, possibly, despite the joke that the name stands for ‘But It’s Not Google’.
A friend of mine who works for Microsoft once complained to me about the amount of time he has to spend on his employer’s ‘misguided attempts to keep playing catch-up with Google’. Well, I think with Bing they may have come pretty close. The problem is that it’s taken too long, and it’ll need to be rather better than Google now to get people to break their existing habits.
One thing that would help would be if they paid lots of money to the Mozilla Foundation, as Google do, to make it the default engine in the Firefox search window. But given the company’s history, that would have to be pretty painful!
Still, no doubt it’ll be the default for IE users. I’ve met quite a few of our customers recently who, because of their employer’s policies, are forced to use IE at work. At least having a decent default search engine will make it a bit less painful.
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Why is there so much emotion (positive and negative) when a news story focuses on Microsoft? Let’s stick with the facts and how they might or might not impact us. In what ways is Bing better or worse than Google or Yahoo? How will (or should) Bing’s introduction affect marketers? Here are my newest thoughts on Bing, Yahoo!, and Google.