For a product or software that's leading in the world market, a competitor is required. If not there is no scope for improvement. This is something I believe and many would share the same view point. It has been more than a decade and there has not been anything that could match Googles perfection or Googles search results. Well, I guess we have a challenger now. Microsoft has launched its new search engine BING (beta) on June 2, 2009. Their tag line 'New Decision Engine'. You can read more about the launch over here. The intentions are very clear and have already sent shock waves across Google. You can read this for more information.
I spent a few hours searching using both the tools to compare and see if there are really any differences between the two. The web results displays pretty much the same results in Google and Bing. I did find some differences . Here are a few features of BING that is not in Google. Let me start with the BING homepage.
1. The BING homepage is much better to see since it has images like a water mark and keeps changing day to day.
2. The search results per se does not vary much and really depends on what your search string is. The results page displays related searches on the left side from which the users can chose from. Gives more choices for the user unlike Google.
3. Each of the search result links has a preview section that is displayed when you hover your mouse on a tiny orange button on right of each link. This enables the user to decide whether or not the link is useful or not. This reflects its 'new Decision Engine and consumer brand' selling point of MS.
4. It is not required to scan through multiple pages while searching for images. New images are downloaded as we scroll down the page.
5. Video search results showed the most difference. A mere hovering over the video thumbnails with the mouse pointer lets you watch the preview. The left menu provides options to chose the type of video you require like screen size, length, resolution etc.
6. The user is able to set his own security settings to control the way results are displayed.
There could be other differences but these are just the ones I could find after a few hours of comparison. BING is still in its beta version and there could be teething problems. It is still too early to say if BING has any edge over Google. The toughest part to change would be the peoples perception. All of us are so used to Google and to think of a change would take some convincing to do by MS BING.
"Bing Is Not Google" Time will only tell. :-)
