I will admit that the Bing image search is a little better than Google’s which is starting to becoming stale and outdated. Showing 18 images per page with a page directory at the bottom is a little bit passé.
However, the only reason why Bing is getting all this attention in the first place (as evidenced by this forum thread) is because it’s owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft has brand power.
By the sum of its parts, Bing isn’t anything new. It’s a generic search engine with a couple usability enhancements. It takes more than “a couple enhancements” to wow me away from something as dependable as google.
Remember: Firefox is NOT Internet Explorer “with a couple enhancements”. It’s a re-design of what a web browser should be, and that’s why it is so successful.
Now, what I can’t stand most of all is that Microsoft will most likely make Bing.com a default search engine on Internet Explorer, and because IE is installed on computers by default, Bing will be the first search engine people will see.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s an uneven playing field when you’re battling Google, a company that crawled its way from a garage in the rural US.
They still have the best product on the market (although Bing does exceed Google’s basic search appliance in a few ways), but most any search term into Google will leads to tons of crap from “link-farms” that provide no real content and it’s beginning to get pretty frustrating. In a lot of ways I think Google now provides even less utility than it did five years ago before cynically manipulative “webmasters” figured out how to manipulate Google’s search results to spill forth tons of crap.
Bing seems to focus more upon a trusted content provider model that intends to reduce the number of clicks required to get a certain result. For instance, why shouldn’t entering a UPS tracking number into a search box take me straight to the tracking info for that package. Obviously both Google and Bing provide this service, but my point is that there’s plenty of performance gains out there yet to be realized in the search market. Microsoft’s customer research has proved that many searches require 4-5 iterations to hon in on what’s actually wanted. If they’re actually able to develop a dependable product that reduces that number to one or two searches, they’ll have a compelling product.
Huh…I actually think the ad is quite clever. Not enough that I don’t automatically Google anything I’m looking for…but quite clever IMHO.
I’m not sure why anyone would be vaguely terrified, though. I also don’t see how anyone who has ever used Google wouldn’t get what the ad is trying to say.
Casual searcher here. I’ve been impressed the few times I tried out Bing, much better than the old Microsoft search, cool mouse-over video previews, and yeah purty. It is now first in my search bar. Now that Wolfram Alpha thing sucked raw putty balls.
Threemae–I don’t disagree with your comments about how Google could be better. If Bing does indeed adress these issues…well, you wouldn’t know it from the ads.
The message I’ve gotten from the ads is “we’re better than Google.” Which begs the question, “Why?” They don’t explain why they’re better. The thing about “search overload?” Well, there have been lots of sites that were supposed to have addressed that, but they haven’t worked that well in practice. About.com anyone?
There’s nothing in the ad that tells me why I should bother trying Bing instead of Google. Google may have its problems, but I’m so used to those things that working around them doesn’t seem to cause any extra hardship. I’m used to Google.
Maybe that’s why the thought of using Bing is sort of stressful. Even if it would be easier than Google in the long run, it will be harder in the short term because I’m not used to it.
I’m more than happy to try something new, but you’ve got to give me some reason other than vague insinuations that the new thing is “better.”
I don’t know if it’s better or not…but I think it’s kind of silly to think that Microsoft should show that their product is better than Google. That doesn’t seem to be the trend in advertising these days. Instead, nearly every ad I can think of just attempts to either paint their competition in a bad light and/or look edgy and cool. Bing gets points on both counts IMHO…they demonstrate some of the flaws with Google (without specifically mentioning them) AND the commercials are edgy.
Sort of like those Sheeple car commercials…same kind of thing.
Google made search useful again after the 1990s. That alone gave it a lot of clout.
What? Are we using the same Google? That was true of AltaVista and Yahoo back in 1996, when keyword spamming still worked.
This is true for some searches. Google, however, can fight back more effectively than earlier search engine companies could, leading to a tug-of-war effect where the SEO slimeballs develop a technique that works for a while, before Google notices and shuts them down.
This can be useful, as long as the providers don’t get gamed or simply swamped with new information. DMOZ/Yahoo learned this the hard way, back when the web was still relatively small.
I’ll agree with this. I’ll go further and say that Google needs some real competition. I doubt very much that Microsoft is the company to provide it, based on its past results relative to the Internet.
If. Maybe. Possibly. Who knows? How was Live Search working out for them before they renamed it to a four-letter word?
Given that they can’t seem to make search work on the desktop of a single computer, I don’t have any reason to believe they’ll do a much better job on the whole Internet.
Without this thread I would still be clueless as to what they were advertising. I sure wasn’t gong to do a search to find out what it was about. It’s super annoying and obtuse making me run for cover. Now at least I know who is to blame. :Smashy smile goes here:
I’m a fan of Google. As far as I’m concerned, Google and Pixar can take over the world. One of the problems with searches now is that through places like associatedcontent show the exact same text over hundreds, if not thousands of pages. May the heavens help you if you try to find something mentioned in a Reuters article. I wish Google would figure out a way to parse out identical texts in a meaningful manner.
Bing seems like it is trying to hard to make me like it. Like it is the cool thing to do. All the hip kids are using it!
Except I’m not interested in cool. I’m interested in finding shit I’m looking for. I do not want widgets and wadgets and flying text and flashing lights. Heck, I look at those things as shit that slows me down from finding the stuff I need.
Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t remember what made Google famous. I do. It was the world where everyone wanted their site to be a portal. Every portal had to have news, movie times, quotes of the day, stock tickers, celebrity tell-alls, daily crosswords and whatever else they could cram on your 800x600 screen.
Then came Google. A logo, a search box, a search button and this little button that said “I feel lucky.” And damned, if you put in a search term and hit the “I feel lucky” button, you’d find what you were looking for!
IMO, the ads last too long. We get it–the whole play on words and context etc. I don’t need to see (what seems like) a whole minute of misconstructions and misunderstandings to get it.
I now mute the ad when it plays and actually leave the room to do other things until the show resumes. Somehow, I doubt that is what the marketers intended.
Well for me it’s the commercials. The noise of the commercials is designed to be stressful, and it’s supposed to make me thing Google is stressful, it doesn’t, it makes me think Bing is stressful.
How is it silly to think that Microsoft should tell us why their prodcut is better? Sure I’m attracted to products that are hip and edgy, but if all that they have to offer, well, that’s not enough. An ad can easily stress their cool brand image and give us some factual information about actual features that we might be interested in.
Just because ads like the Bing ads are the “trend in advertising these days” doesn’t mean that they work.
Ah, maybe that’s a factor too.
Another stressor and a major factor that makes me wary of using a Microsoft search engine is one of the most annoying features of their applications, namely “autocorrect.” Microsoft seems to think that it knows what you want to do more than you know what you want to do. No no no. Some of the autocorrect stuff can’t even be manually turned off! (I’m stuck doing this multi-hundred-page presentation in Powerpoint at work and I’m ready to bullet-point someone, if you know what I mean.)
I like how Google gives you suggestions if it thinks you might have meant something other than what you typed, but it does search on what you actually did type. What’s Bing going to do? Search on what it thinks you should have searched on rather than what you actually searched on?
You mean because they filter search results for Chinese consumers?
What would have happened if they didn’t filter? Wouldn’t the Chinese government have taken steps to block or ban Google completely?
Seems to me that they chose the lesser of two evils.
What gets me is that ‘decision engine’ crap. I don’t know, but I find it vaguely threatening in the dystopic fiction-moulded paranoid sub-centres of my mind – a small step into ‘I mean, who really wants to think for themselves?’-land. Way things are, google’s already making too many decisions for my taste; I do bloody well mean what I wrote in that box, thanksalot.
And Google will search for what you wrote. It will only redirect you automatically if it didn’t find anything for your query (and I’ve noticed that it doesn’t do that like it used to, either), which usually means you completely muffed the spelling. However, Google is basing its reputation on being helpful, and that means offering spelling corrections because most people can’t spell for shit.
