Greetings world. This here is the Dev team over at Zoom Creates. We work with the internet a lot. In fact, when the internet isn’t working, we all freak out a little bit.
One of the biggest uses for the internet over here in the Development department is the search. We search for programming syntax, open source tools, blog post and screen cast tutorials, our own names, Keyboard Cat videos; all the essentials. Google has been the king of the hill for a long time, and it’s well-deserved. If you can’t find what you are looking for on the first two pages of a Google search, you’re probably searching incorrectly. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t always room to improve, though, and competition drives innovation.
The latest competition comes from Microsoft. Their new Decision Engine (supposedly better than a search engine?) is called Bing, and it’s supposed to knock Google down a few notches. We here on the Dev team are pretty biased, but we’re always willing to give something a try. We decided to do a couple of quick searches and share our results, and were actually pretty surprised.
Traditional Web Search:
When searching for anything, we just type in the box and relevant pages are fed straight to us. We are quite used to the way Google displays their results: standard web colors, the link is the page title, plus a tidbit of text taken from the content of said page. Very straightforward and easy to follow. No wonder Bing uses the same approach. Their results page looks so familiar to us that it’s almost silly. Google put their logo in the top left corner, and links to all their different tools above that. Bing looks the exact same, with links to other Microsoft products located in the exact same place. The two engines pretty much mirror each other. Bing does list out your search history, which is something new, but I didn’t find that feature useful. Usually if I searched for something else, the first search I did didn’t return the results I wanted, so why would I want to look at those again? Bing also puts content from the site in a little hover box next to the result. Move your mouse over that line on the right side and you should get a quick page snippet. That was actually kinda cool, but again not that useful because I usually found myself clicking on the link just to read the content anyway. I guess if you are a heavy mouse user, this could be a great feature, but I always end up using my keyboard a lot.
Image Search:
Google and Bing have very similar interfaces for their results on image searches as well. The only thing I noticed was that Bing used more Javascript. Thumbnails are shown without any details until you hover over them, at which point they zoom in a bit and show you the site details. Also, Bing seems to be returning more results via AJAX or something so that you never have more than one page of results. It just keeps expanding getting longer and longer and longer…
Video Search:
Very similar results here as well. Bing has video clip playback when you hover over the thumbnail, which is kinda cool, and I did like that feature. Other than that, they both had the same criteria to filter your results (quality, url, length, etc.).
Maps:
Google Maps wins.
In conclusion, Google is the king of search and Bing is the new kid on the block with big muscles. Funny thing is, Bing looks and acts almost the same as Google, so how will it ever de-seat the reigning King? If Microsoft really wants to dethrone Google, they are going to have to do much more than copy them. Supposedly Bing was released as a Decision Engine, meaning that it can help you make decisions easier. As power users/programmers, we’ve never really had any problems making decisions with our search results. This could be different for the computer illiterate, but I guess time will tell whether or not Bing can reach out to those users better than Google. With things like Google Hacks, Google Code, Gmail, Google Wave, Google Chat, we’ll stick with what we know and have come to love.
I agree that Bing is showing off some fancy tricks, which in turn should eventually drive innovation for better, richer search results from every search tool. However, Google still reigns supreme as the search leader… for now. From a Google fanboy… go GOOG!
not a bad effot from microsoft. i think it will be most popular for novice computer users.