Can it be that the Redmond juggernaut has pulled off the unthinkable? Have you taken a look at Bing?
When was the last time you heard the words ‘impressive’ or ‘innovative’ in the same sentence with the word ‘Microsoft’? News about tech innovation seems to be all about companies like Google and Apple, to the point that one might wonder if new Microsoft offerings are looked at objectively. One has to be impressed with the trajectories of Google and Apple in the last 10-12 years, as companies and in terms of their products, but as consumers we can’t forget that we benefit from challenges to the status quo. I just wasn’t expecting such a viable challenge from Microsoft, in search.
Miguel over at RealSoftwareDevelopment.com has done an outstanding comparison of Google and Bing, and makes a very compelling case that Bing does a better job at search than Google in four areas: search results, interface/usability, image search and video search. I assume that the size of Google’s index is far superior to anyone else, but for everyday searches (of the non-longtail variety) that may not be too relevant. If Microsoft has packaged a bunch of compelling improvements to the user experience, it’s easy to imagine people looking seriously at Bing for search, and even an incremental reversal in Google’s growing market share would be an enormous turnaround for Microsoft.
