Bing was launched as Microsoft’s attempt to take some of the search market share away from Google. It seems in the first week they did have some gains. I know from our web stats that the traffic from google outweighs the other two by miles, and the launch of Bing hasn’t made a dent in that – yet.
Plenty of people have played around with the name; my favourite suggestion so far is
“I tried a Google translate (Chinese to English) and came up with “will be” or “biscuit,” but Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, says it means “very certain to answer” in Chinese, and there’s no way a Microsoft employee would ever overpromise and under deliver.”
I’ve played around with Bing and it’s got some nice features and the experience of using it is good. But the results returned are still a little wonky, particularly in the faceted search; Turkey>images>people>head and shoulders includes these results;
these images don't look like people
But even more fun can be had with “blindsearch” a tool built by someone at microsoft just for fun, for a search term it presents the results from Bing, Google and Yahoo – logo free. When you make your choice the search engines are revealed.
Initially the results of the race between the search engines was also shown – but that’s been removed. I tried it on a range of different plausible search terms – and the results tended to be very very similar.
Compare Search results of Bing, Google and Yahoo with blind search
Tags: bing, google, Microsoft, search, search engines
