Bing Search Rocks – Really!

Has anybody noticed how cool Bing Search is becoming. No? Then I’ll just highlight some bits:

Search Results

First off about a year ago I would search for something on Bing then do the same search on Google – just in case. To be fair I’d say 95% of the time even back then the results were as good as Google. Now I don’t even do a comparison search. To me the results are every bit as good. The fact that I don’t need to search elsewhere says it all. On occasion I slip back to Google if I can’t find what I want but lately even Google hasn’t had the answer either. I have even had occasions (shock, horror, gasp!) when Bing’s results were better than Google’s as I still occasionally have a comparison, just for fun, if I have time. Better to me, means more relevant in that I found my answer closer to the top of page 1.

Look and Feel

Sorry to the big G and all, but Bing looks and feels much nicer to me. It’s warmer, I love the home page pictures and interesting information snippets, I’ve even clicked on a few of the links. The results pages are easier on the eye AND … (look at picture) …

… you now get instant preview of the search results, so you can suss out whether or not the page you’re going to look at is worthy. Yes I know Firefox and now IE8 have the Accelerator’s etc, but this is built into the search engine. Really nice. On certain search results you get additional information on the left hand side with handy quick link facets … (see screen shot below) …

It’s all neat stuff. Yes, I know Google has similar but they are by default hidden and if you enable them, next session they’re hidden again.

Images and Videos

The image search is dead cool and provides infinite scrolling, not paging, of images, they just get sent down when you scroll. The videos have a great feature of instant preview where you hover over a video and it plays so you can see immediately if it’s relevant. It’s cool stuff.

so … I don’t Google anymore, I Bing It!

I’d like to say I was not paid in anyway by Microsoft to write this article, neither was I approached beforehand, I simply wrote it as I thought that Bing isn’t getting the credit it deserves and I find it incredibly useful and powerful and seem to have finally freed myself from Google now. I’m not saying Google isn’t a great Search Engine, I just prefer Bing. Free country right?

Cheers

Dave Mc

The Blog

Dave Mc muses about history, travel, writing, coaching, astronomy, technology and life, family and the world around us. You may agree with his opinions, you may not, that’s life …