Microsoft’s MSN to Bing gamble is paying off. Bing’s market share has reached into double digit for the first time.
There is not much new in Bing. “Bing is a new chassis with same old engine”. What Microsoft did was to give it a new name, new face and decorate it with some interesting thing to make it look like new “stuff” and they topped it up with publicity to push it as a new search engine.
The presentation is attractive, well much more attractive than Google’s simple (boring) look.
I like the way they display the background image and stuff in some interesting facts at various spot.
The footer also displays some interesting articles from wiki.
However all of above are kind of distraction for searchers. Whenever I go to search for something I get deviated by other links. No wonder why Google still enjoys the No.1 position because of the most simple fact that it is just Search Engine.
I wish Bing was just as Google – Search Engine. However Microsoft never gives up in stuffing in as much elements of their network as possible in almost all of their services and which ultimately becomes a flop show.
Search Results
It seems more or less Bing displays the same result as Google. A search for my own name Ajay Kumar Singh on Bing shows this blog as No. 1, same as it shows on Google.
Bing favors its own community and if you have signed up in community then it might shows up details from there as well. I’m signed up for Community and it shows my profile page in the first page for my name search.
Bing’s country specific search is not so relevant and not as good as Google’s one. I searched for keyword SEO to display searches from UK only and couldn’t find my business website in top 10 where as it is on top 10 on Google for UK search results.
New Features
Bing has added some of new features. For instance on the right side of title you can see the latest posts from the blog.
What lacks
Bing doesn’t allow to display more than 10 results per page until and unless you login and change the it from the account settings. in Google you can exactly change it to display up to 100 results per page without logging into account. I use this feature quite heavily for my SEO work and I wish Bing could also provide this feature.
Domain name search doesn’t work. For instance if you type swamiseo.co.uk it will not display any result and it would rather suggest swamiseo keyword. In Google you would see the pages which link to swamiseo.co.uk
Country specific searches
Bing simply doesn’t show relevant result in country specific searches. Well it is still in Beta so we can’t expect all the features in it. Lets see when it builds up enough capability to show localized searches.
Image Searches
Image search in Bing is not as improved as it is in Google. Bing displays Image search results in iframe which is nuisance. It also doesn’t show the source of image until and unless you hover over the image.
Image results in Google are much better, simplified and display relevant information.
It seems bing image indexing is not sophisticated enough to build up a large database of images. Bing displays images from well known and big websites rather than well optimized small websites.
What is Good
Ever wonder why Google shows wiki in the top of search result for any keyword which has got an entry in Wiki? It is just sheer insanity.
Let me explain with an example. Visit Google.co.in and enter keyword Laptop and see the result. Google displays news items (useless) followed by Wiki (another useless result). When someone types keyword Laptop he is not interested in Google News or in Wiki, all he wants is to find out the latest laptops and probably to buy it.
Google loves Wiki.
Bing doesn’t love wiki so it doesn’t show up all the time.
Bing has to improve the search result display a lot to match with Google’s search. It shows Wiki which is completely irrelevant for the searched keyword.
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