Bing.com – Banana Peel of the Month - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

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.

This morning at approximately 9:30 the team at Ziller noticed something, Google was down. Both the .com.au and .com domain were inaccessible for around 15 minutes. It makes you realise they are human after all.

For many years now I have been very impressed with Google and everything that they do. They always seem to be developing and always seem to get it right. I look at the way Microsoft and a lot of other companies do things and thought if they only followed Google’s path they would be in a much better place. Take Yahoo’s sponsored search and compare it to Google’s AdWords – its a joke how far ahead Google are.

Now just as I finish praising Google I am going to take a little stab at them. As mentioned I never ever found a fault with their services and everything was always perfect, however in the past couple of weeks some things have been brought to my attention that Google may be looking to far ahead and not giving their current projects enough attention.

One example is my Google Calendar – I use it all the time and rely on it to organise my life (and business) however two days ago I noticed that the email reminders I set for my events just stopped sending. Luckily I remembered these events on my own so it was not too much of an issue, but how can it just stop all of a sudden? This is such a critical feature to go wrong if they expect their calendar to be successful. I later did a few searches on the internet and I found other people with similar issues, but as yet no fix.

There were a bunch of other similar things that happened causing me to right this post that I wont get into, however the point I am making is that I had such high respect for anything Google did, if they brought out a new feature I would use it instantly because if it was Google it had to be good.

I guess though after all Google are human and humans do make mistakes, it’s only because of their success and such high quality services provided in the past that they get criticised when small things go wrong.

I have recently noticed how the team at Google as added trademark ™ display to their keyword tool. To me it’s obvious they are trying to let users know that potential keywords they wish to bid for, may well be trademarked and out of the question.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The other thing I noticed is that not many keywords display the trademark image, even though in fact they are trademarked. Would be interesting to know how long ago this feature was released and if they are just in the process of adding the image to all trademarks.