Big bing, big bang

In 2004, speaking to this correspondent during an interview for BT, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer mentioned that Google was just a fad, and that Microsoft’s (then) soon to be launched MSN search engine would finish off Google. The rest, as they say, is history.

Bing, the latest from Microsoft, is their fourth iteration of a search engine. In 2008, it tried to buy Yahoo! because Microsoft felt it needed to improve its search. However, till now they haven’t challenged Google’s supremacy. So, how is Bing? Indian blogs and Twitter users are horrified that “Bing” has censored “Sex” search results, which even a cursory look at Google Trends will point out is the highest searched term in India. However, Google also tends to ignore Sex when issuing its family friendly annual search Zeitgeist.

So, how is Bing? Indian blogs and Twitter users are horrified that “Bing” has censored “Sex” search results, which even a cursory look at Google Trends will point out is the highest searched term in India. However, Google also tends to ignore Sex when issuing its family friendly annual search Zeitgeist.

So, how do they compare? We did three searches on June 4 to find out.

Search 1: Beyond “Sex”, Bing is a very good search engine, but trying a rather generic search term, in this case “Air France 447” (the plane that crashed in the Atlantic), brought up quite different search terms on Bing and Google. Bing’s first result was the current day’s flight status, Google’s was a link to a story in Time magazine, which given the accident, was far more relevant. Google: 1; Bing: 0

Search 2: Next we did an ego search—”Kushan Mitra”. Google brought up my LinkedIn profile on top. Bing brought up an old news item, but the rest of the first page results on Bing included recent stories. Google threw up some old stories I had forgotten I had done. Google: 1; Bing: 1

Search 3: Since I was writing this article from the Press Centre at Computex 2009 in Taipei, the search was for “Computex 2009”. Bing threw up some interesting links, but Google merged slightly more mediocre results with better news links. Google: 2; Bing: 1

My conclusion: Bing is nice, but not a Google killer yet. I use Google Chrome as my browser and Google is embedded into my address bar. I’m not going to change my settings for Bing. That said, it costs nothing to try it out and you should be fair and do just that. The big worry for Bing, though, is that humans are creatures of habit. And unfortunately for Ballmer, Google isn’t just a fad, it is a habit.