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Before you read this, go visit Bing then come back. If you are reading this after Thursday, July 3rd, click on the little 'left arrow' in the lower right corner of the Bing homepage until you get to the panda to see what I'm talking about.
So as I mentioned in class, while I have nothing against anyone having a favorite company, to direct undue hate or vitriol against their competitor is unnecessary. I like all companies equally for what they contribute, and I'll castigate any company if I feel they've gone the wrong direction. That being said, one of the services that seems to get a lot of ridicule is Microsoft's Bing. If you're unfamiliar, Bing is Microsoft's search engine, a competitor to Google. No one bats an eye if they they hear the phrase "Google it," there's even a webpage that will do it automatically, but if someone says "Bing it" they risk getting beaten up.
I personally use both. Bing - in my opinion anyway - is better in some aspects such as image, travel and technical searches, while Google is better for pop-culture, academic and news searches. In the interest of full disclosure, when I took the Bing-it-on challenge, Google won hands down. It was a rousing defeat of Bing.
Bing is similar, however it includes a usually stunning image as its background, with hotspots that provide additional information about the picture. Back in 2011, though, they started occasionally animating their backgrounds using the HTML 5 specification, and some of those animations have been spectacular. The collapsible, filmstrip-like news stories along the bottom are a nice touch as well, although they are sometimes entertainment-heavy in their stories.
I read, with interest, this post as it reflects my opinion of both Google and Bing as search engines. Google returns so much when requesting a search, but I wonder what it does not return and, frankly, how would I know? I love Bing for the images and like to mouse around the hot spots (it fulfills the traveler in me), but do not use it for my primary search provider.
ReplyDeleteWorking with Microsoft products and attending Microsoft events such as Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), employees of Microsoft and Microsoft MVPs catch themselves saying "Google It" and then correct themselves to say "Bing It".
ReplyDeletePersonally, working with Microsoft products, I find that Bing provides better results for what I am looking for. Every once in a while, I will still use Google to see if it provides any better results, and usually they are the same. Also, with the Bing Rewards, I have been able to get Amazon Gift Cards, enter Sweepstakes (still haven't won) and get an additional 100 GB on my OneDrive until 2019.