Auditioning Bing DAY 4

June 18,2009



…. NEWS FLASH… NEWS FLASH ….

MSFT seems to have developed a winning product in the search market. People are switching from Google to Bing. It used to be that nobody switched from Google to anything. Bing looks like a homerun.

…developing…

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Auditioning Bing DAY 4

A few more observations and impressions of my own, and sampling the tech buzz about Bing.

Late afternoon on Day 4 of my Bing experience. My feeling of comfort and emotional ease is growing with Bing. Bing is my IE8 home page and my default search engine or decision engine as MSFT likes to call it.

A settling.
Each morning a new Bing homepage photo with it’s unique virtual tour of un-obtrusive mouse over post-its. Pretty, relaxing, but not distracting. I was initially concerned that I might get tired of seeing a large photo on my IE8 home page, find it distracting or annoying.

Unobtrusive in a search engine home page is important, I do not want to be distracted if I need to get down to searching in a hurry. But not a problem with Bing, it seems to be ok.

Things I miss with Bing.

I miss Google translate.

It is very cool and personally useful to quickly translate foreign words, phrases, and text by pasting into Google translate boxes. I liked having that translate option a click away from the Google homepage. As of now, Bing doesn’t have the translate link showing on its homepage, but it’s not so bad. I just added the Google translate link to my IE8 favorites list.

Things I like with Bing.

Display of image and video search results on Bing are clearly better than Google.

Bing image and video search results are displayed in clean looking arrays of thumbnails. The size of thumbnails and caption on/off selectable by click icons at the upper right of the results page.

I like that I can quickly examine my search results by scrolling down the page. Contrast Google, where search results are paragraphs of busy looking text with inset thumbnails. Advantage to Bing.

Try this. Go to Bing home page, click ‘images,’ then enter ’Aircraft’ in the search box. Awesome results pages.

Now some of the buzz about Bing.

As of the beginning of this week, Bing penetration of search market is impressive at 16.7% (of all daily searches).

Last month, before Bing, MSFT search engines accounted for 13.7% of daily searches. In the second week of Bing availability, the number has grown to 16.7%. That is a 3% increase in MSFT’s share of total search market in just two weeks.

This has generated a serious buzz in the tech world.

A widely reported rumor is that GOOGLE boy wonder, Sergey Brin, has pulled together a working group of Google brains to examine the Bing search algorithm.

A few choice comments from Tech Crunch news site:

“I’ve never seen a search engine go from 9% to 12% in a period of about 2-3 weeks. Simply amazing. ”

“Bing is great. I hope they bring some much needed competition to the Big G.”

“I guess Carol Bartz’ dream of Buckets of Money for Yahoo’s Search is not going to happen.”

“Steve Ballmer must be laughing now. Saved $50B price tag for Yahoo, and has a competitive search engine.”

“Is it time to short GOOG?”

“My wife and I bought MSFT at $21.5 because Bing rocks.”


And so, that’s the latest. Very interesting.

Thank you for following and stay tuned for the next episode of Auditioning Bing.

Tempted to change the title of this series to “America’s Next Top Search Engine.”

Resisting the temptation.