Question: What does BING stand for?
Answer: But It’s Not Google.
Admittedly, I am a sucker for marketing. Microsoft is excellent at blowing their own horn loud enough for us all to hear it. So, like anyone else with a broadband connection an 37 seconds to kill, I was off to experience the next big thing. Bing.
For a split-second, I expected Christmas music. To my chagrin, there was no tribute to the legendary crooner. The first thing that grabbed me is the beautiful, yet bandwidth-hogging photo that loads behind the search area. The second thing that grabs you is disorientation. It’s good to see that Gates & Co. continue to make quantity job #1. The pretty picture that loads on the home page has mouseover hints to help you discover the significance or subject of the photo. That’s cute, but when does anyone go to a search engine to have it ask them questions? I’m afraid this may only serve to help me forget what I came here for. I proceeded to give Bing a spin with a search for myself. No surprise; Michael Patrick King has kept me safely hidden on page 4.
I now go to the image search, glad to find a page that carries the familiarity of the competition. Expanding mouseovers make it fun, but the fact that the page never stops loading got a bit aggravating. Just when you get halfway down the page, you notice that images have been loading into your previously viewed area. That’s not cool. My visit with Bing is over and, realizing that my 37 seconds are up, I head back to work.
My experience had me asking one single question: “So what?”. Microsoft has succeeded in creating another product I will learn, but only because I have to. The ground didn’t move, my trigger wasn’t tripped, and I now want my time back. To be honest, I felt that I was more susceptible to viruses by being on Bing.
Thanks to Jeff Cole for the joke to start this article.
Entertaining writing as always. When I first heard of the Big Redmond machine that birthed BING, I thought of “Ba-Da-BING” and not the singer.
I think the real battle will come in the deals that BING could get into with mobile devices and other non-personal computing devices. For me, Web Searching is like a dictionary utility that gets me the small things that I’m looking for. The more complex of a thing I need to find, the faster I realize that a dictionary utility won’t do the trick for me.
I use Google because it’s on my Safari and FireFox search tab. I work with Google is because it’s universal and I can sell my clients on it. It’s success is because I don’t think about it, using it as an action verb. Microsoft getting me to think about SEARCH may make me laugh.. but unless they can pull an Internet Explorer over a Netscape again, then it seems that we’re all say “ba-da-BING-ba-da-BOOM!” in the next several years.
By the way, when is Windows 9 Office 2010 coming out again?
I use Bing and Google whenever i want to find something on the internet. I think that both search engines are very good. *
It is interesting to compare the performance of Bing and Google search but i haven’t seen any difference at all in their performance. .*