How to make an honest opinion about Bing

by phil on Monday Jun 8, 2009 10:49 AM
user experience

So I made Bing my default search engine for a week, and thank God it's Monday. The most compelling reason to switch back to Google is because Google Maps is so much better. I'd often type in a query like "Chipotle Austin, TX" in Bing and not see results that I knew were definitely here. Or if they were here, I'd have to use a few more clicks on Bing to zoom into the view I really wanted. Having said this, though, my verdict is not statistically sound enough for me.

Fortunately, I just found out about BlindSearch. It conducts your searches in Yahoo, Google, and Bing and presents the results in a randomized 3-column layout with all the engine's brand cruft scratched out. On the first search I did, for philosophistry, I voted for the Bing version! (via waxy)

I decided to renew my 1-week experiment with Bing by making BlindSearch my default search engine. To make this happen in Firefox, I'm using this add-on: Add to Search Bar.

Comments

John said on August 2, 2009 4:48 AM:

Just did a few queries and voted: Google 5, Yahoo 1, Bing 0.

Mind you, Bing was very close to Google in all of those, except the one Yahoo won, in which it returned an error - 'free porn'. (Yahoo was otherwise a distant third. And I double-checked, bing.com will indeed return results for 'free porn' - if anything better than the others.)

I didn't get around to testing 'alternative word' issues (Google's annoying trend towards predicting what you meant to type), also the site can't handle local-specificity (which means a lot here in Australia - and Google does very well at).