Bing.com – Banana Peel of the Month
Banana Peels
Yes I know – it’s been a while since our last Banana Peel of the month. Things here at Ziller have been a little crazy to start the year, however we are now back and ready to continue into 2010. To kick proceedings off – welcome Bing.com – our March Banana Peel of the Month.
If you are not aware of or have never used Bing, it is a new search engine which was developed by Microsoft and was launched in May last year with serious intentions of taking on the big giant Google. During the launch Microsoft’s chief executive officer Steve Ballmer was quoted:
“Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions”
What a joke.
When Bing was launched, I was looking forward to seeing what Microsoft would come up with and how they would make search better. Now, just the other day I swore I would never use Bing (or Yahoo for that matter) again.
We were launching a clients website for beta testing and during the transfer to a new server, there were some server related coding issues we came across. Naturally, we tried ‘Googling’ the error code as we know it is one great way to solve a problem as often users out there have faced the same problem before and have either blogged about it or posted on a forum. Google returned pages of relevant search results to the problem, however we did not find a solution right away so thought we would go and perform the same search at Bing.
What Bing returned in the serp (search engine results page) amazed me. It’s first 2 or 3 pages returned websites that actually had the same problem. By this what I mean is that the error I was searching for was so common that many websites out there were actually down due to this very same error, they showed a white page with error output – obviously of no help what so ever to me.
When I performed this search at Google, Google was smarter enough to understand that I was searching for a solution. Google returned forums, blogs and websites that discussed the error, while Bing and Yahoo returned only sites that actually had the error. Google still returned these sites in the my search, however they were on page 4 and 5.
Google knew what I wanted and delivered it, the others didn’t.
Sorry Steve, but so much for finding information quickly and using the information I have found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions. Fail.
