16. 11.
My day isn’t exactly over, but I thought it would be a good time to share my initial results with my Bing Experiment - switching to Bing as my primary search engine for a week.
First impressions: I have to say I really like the home page photographs and teasers. That’s a pretty cool little feature and I bet it gets a lot of people thinking about things they might not otherwise. It puts a nice face on the utility of search and so I give kudos to Microsoft for this little bit of fun. I suspect this is something that goes over well with the consumer computer crowd - the “buy a PC from Best Buy and surf with Internet Explorer” type. Although this in no way impacts search results, I expect it might keep some folks coming back for more. As for me? Not a deal clincher - it’s all about the search results.
Some while ago I ran into the need to style form buttons with CSS and had run a Google query for “CSS Submit Button”. Today I ran into the need again and realized this was a good time to check out what Bing offered side by side with Google. The results?
Interestingly both search engines gave the same result for #1 (which by the way was a fine choice - the page answers my question) and they agree on three out of the top ten, although they place them in different spots. What I noticed by going through the process of checking the top ten on each engine was that both Bing and Google seemed to give a mix of pages that were directly related to my search terms and pages that are of a slightly broader nature. Both engines delivered one page which had no answers or example code, but were heavy in the use of the keywords “css button”. Overall, neither engine outperformed the other. Given my initial skepticism about another Microsoft search engine, I have to call this a win for Bing.
Tomorrow I will be sure to test the engines against each other for something a bit more fun: video. If you have suggestions for how to kick the tires on video search please comment either on the blog or on Facebook if that’s where you read my blog from.
Ed Rooney