If Search Is Broken, How Has Bing Fixed It?

      by Wyatt Walter

I really don’t mean to be one of those nay-saying Microsoft haters. Really, I don’t. But I’m still looking for that feature that Bing offers me that Google doesn’t (except of course for the cool images on the homepage). Is it the shopping? I think not. My new wife and I recently purchased a Samsung plasma tv. I decided to take Bing for a test run to see if it helped me make the decision.

First, I did a search in Google’s shopping section. We decided on the Samsung PN50A550. The model has been discontinued and the price was right at a local shop here in town. What I found was actually a bit surprising. My search on Google returned a nice little price range as well as some reviews, some technical specs, and some other related items I might be interested in.
samsung-a550-google

And Bing? Well.. it returns nothing. That’s right, I was brought to a page with two HDMI cables. No prices, no reviews, nothing.
samsung-a550-bing

Well, since my tv shopping resulted in a complete failure, I decided to check out the travel feature. Like I said earlier, I have a new wife and we just got back from our honeymoon just a few weeks ago. We decided to go to Daytona Beach. Bing hadn’t been launched yet when we were planning the trip, but I decided to go to Bing to see what the hotel selection was like.

Bing’s hotel selection was actually pretty good when going through the travel section of Bing’s site. It let me pick which features I was looking for and found the best prices. It acted much like any big travel site that you’d find around the web — pick your dates and location and it spits out the best prices. What was interesting to me was that typing “daytona beach hotels” into the search bar didn’t bring up the same interface. In fact, I couldn’t distinguish their search results from Google’s except that Google showed the suggested similar search terms at the bottom except on the top like Bing. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the cheapest hotel, so it was a great feature that I could select the features that I needed on the side.

So how did Bing work for me? Well, in shopping for my tv, it was a complete and utter failure. Google clearly took the upper hand since.. well it returned results. For the hotels, Bing clearly dominated Google – as long as I knew where to go in the interface (except, one could argue that if I knew where to go in the first place I wouldn’t need to search). In my case, Bing really was a fancy new interface for a travel site like Travelocity or some other similar site. Even then, it was an improvement. But is Bing really fixing search? I would argue not. It’s an improvement on shopping, probably. A fix for search? Well I’m not so sure it’s broken, but I honestly can’t see a difference except for the interface is slightly rearranged.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 16th, 2009

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