First Look at Bing

Like most people, I use internet search quite often although I am no expert on how the various search engines compare with one another. I am however open to alternatives to the one search engine I use most often - Google - since I have for some time had vague negative feelings about the quality of its results. Exactly why this was so, I just could not put pin down.

Experimenting with Microsoft's Bing search engine, I am beginning to understand. The quality of the top search results is subtly better. I don't quite know why this is so, but let me try to articulate what I am seeing.

With Google, there is an excellent probability that the top result will be the one I want. But when it isn't, it is a pain. Whatever their search algorithm does, it seems to pull up a lot of results that are either obscure, poorly related to the search terms, spammy sites, or variations of the other unwanted results.

Trying the same searches with Bing shows up some differences. Again, it is very good at delivering a top search result that is what I want. I am sure there must be some difference between Bing and Google, but that is not apparent from the brief testing I've done. The difference is in the other top results, and especially where the search is one more obscure terms.

What Bing seems to be doing is delivering more variety in the top results. By this I mean, rather than results closely associated with the top result, it elevates a few results from more diverse sources. This brings to the fore a better selection of top results that may contain what you really want. Google is more prone to burying these results deeper in its list, perhaps many pages down.

Without knowing the actual algorithms, my analysis is perhaps not much better than an educated guess. Yet it seems to be true, and... I like it. It does have its problems, and so my assessment is not all positive. For example, a vanity search on this blog turns up nothing. Nada. It isn't that Blogger blogs are not in their database since I can find popular Blogger sites well covered when I search for those. Then on the positive side there is the image search which I find much easier to navigate, and it has nice features such as auto-zoom when you mouse over a thumbnail. All this makes Bing worth some time to explore.

What I am now going to do is make Bing my primary search engine and use it for a while to see if my initial, positive impression is sustained. I will continue to use Wikipedia for more directed, encyclopedia-style searches since it works well for less-transient information and most articles provide outside references. But for general search I will try Bing. There may be some good reasons why Bing is getting some popular attention.