Screenshots please
Do us a favour and post some screen shots. It's a lot easier than visiting the site to do a Google for something.
Microsoft has given its Bing search engine a spring clean and added status data from geolocation outfit Foursquare into its maps service as an app. This is Redmond's first big upgrade to Bing since it debuted in June last year, when it replaced Microsoft's clunky old Live Search offering. Since then the company has been …
At the moment it's a VERY distant second in terms of the quality and quantity of results it returns for the sort of technical and academic searches I use a search engine for.
I'll keep checking back every couple of months, but as long as Microsoft continues to focus on Web2.0rhea instead of search engine performance, it's never going to be a credible search engine.
Over the years google has become less and less "good" at giving me the results I want near the top.
Now Bing isn't perfect either - not by a long shot - however there's nothing - for the results I want - to distinguish between them, and I prefer Bing's interface more than Google so opt for former.
Still Google now and then, but Bing is my first port of call now. Great thing having some choice in the market - it's up to me! :-)
Bing does do a good job of returning a small set of "mainstream" US-centric results. However, it suffers from overly-aggressive "relevance" filtering (e.g. it's reluctant to return non-English results, even though I've told it to search all languages) and hasn't (yet?) done a very thorough job of indexing the corners of the Internet (e.g. it comes up empty on the exact titles of technical papers I've found with Google).
I've been using Bing as my default choice when I want to google, sorry, search the intertubes for something.
On the whole I find it to be much less spammy than the monolithic upstart - more of the results I get are for real content not rubbish re-post and serve some ads sites.
annoyingly there seem to be a bunch of hard to discover options in queries to make Bing even better but MS are not very good at making them visible
>>The firm's Todd Schwartz said in a blog post that Microsoft carried out research on Bing usage and found that 42 per cent of sessions required search decision "refinements".
Maybe they can refine that pesky stuff called "meaningful results"? So far Bing is just a waste of time. Maybe, sincerely very maybe, in the future they will wise up.
Screw the results or the features...who came up with the name "Bing" anyway???
'cos yeah...Bing really says "advanced search engine" to me.
"Bing" always remins me of the mouth-breathing dopey kid at school with flappy ears, a permanent running nose, two odds socks and untied show laces. Not someone I'd trust to give me reliable information in the least.
Of course, sods law being what it is, Bing is probably now a model & professional athlete, working part-time for CERN or some other boffin central with more letter after his name than the entire alphabet. Lets hope Microsoft's bing matures as well as him.
Then again, Google's name ain't much better - at least it came out in the dotcom/bomb days when silly names were all the rage.
I could probably launch my own search engine - it would be utter crap, but I'd have millions of visitors more than Bing 'cos I'd call it the "ultra-hyper-mega-search-o-matic-o-tron....4000".