During a recent trip to the United States I realised how many people use Bing as their primary search engine. This got me thinking, our team always set the default engine on all devices we give out and deliver to use Google. This is just the status quo, we have been doing this for years and never questioned it.
Every now and then I dabble with alternative search engines like Bing and Yahoo to see what they are up to but its more out of curiosity than the search results. To be honest I go to Yahoo more for laughs and giggles than anything else, they still have not cottoned on to a minimalistic home page, instead they opt for everything all on one page with massive adverts at the top (Business must be doing well). However, looking at http://www.bingiton.com last week I was surprised to see how good their results actually were and thought I wonder if I would notice the difference over a period of a week by just using Bing?
“You need a search engine to find content on Yahoo’s home page”
Here is an example of the results from a “QuadCopter” search on both Google and Bing.
I considered adding Yahoo to the mix but they have a massive advert at the top primary spot on the page surrounded by clutter. I’m still not sure why they need two links to the same core services on one page (Top and Left sidebar). The other down side is that every time I would go to do a search, before you type in “Stone Pizza Dish” you have been side tracked into looking at “9 apps that were banned”, I definitely don’t need that distraction in my life. Marissa, you need to revert back to the Altavista Style.
So as of Monday 27/01/2014 I have tried to default my search engines and home pages to Bing.com and this is my weekly running commentary of how I am finding it. Please note though that this is by no means all my browsing activity only the search activity. A lot of my web usage is on pages that I have bookmarked or use frequently.
Monday 27 January
12:40 – So far so good but most addresses I have been to today are bookmarks or I have typed the address in as I know what I want. I’m surprised that by lunchtime I actually have not used a search yet!
15:25 – Talking about accommodation in Luxembourg I needed to search for a place to stay for a future visit, the search was fine but lack of map results was a bit of a pain. I needed to add “map” at the end of my search and then I realised I needed to use Bing maps, this will be interesting.
15:42 – Stone Pizza Dish – Yes that’s right, as an IT Professional every now and then you need to search for cooking appliances… This time however the results were perfect, IF I lived in the U.S and was not actually looking to buy anything. The clear lack of a “Shopping” option was a pain especially as I was in a rush. I clicked the “MORE” option but still nothing. On this occasion I had to resort to Google.
19:45 – Exchange rates. I needed to do come currency conversion from Pounds to South African Rand. I fired up my browser on the iPad and realised its still Google, is everything a Google search? After switching to Bing I types in “pound to rand” and had all sorts of information, after scrolling down I found the rate, not at the top of the list or anything stand out but I got the answer. As a comparison I used Google and right at the top of the page had my answer, big, bold and standing out along with a chart which gives a nice visual on the history.
Today has been a very slow Search day, I am quite surprised by the very low count above. I do need to do some research on social media integration and post management tomorrow so that will be interesting.
Tuesday 28 January
08:00 – Leaving for an appointment in Basingstoke I typed the destination in. After scrolling 5 pages I had no result and no map on the right, time to switch to Google. After pasting the same search in Google I had my answer at the top of the page along with a Map. I did notice though that I had mistakenly misspelled the word and was missing an “i” so to be fair to Bing I asked the wrong question, but by some magic Google had already corrected this, told me I was wrong and showed me what they thought I was looking for.
12:20 – “Scratch Programming” – This was an easy one, first answer right after the advert, job done.
13:29 – I need to benchmark two computer systems, a quick “free benchmark software” returned enough information for me to get what I needed, No issues here.
14:00 – I am currently trying to redirect a few thousand URL’s. Its a mixture of 404 and 301 redirects. Searching for “importing list of IIS redirects” is proving to be tricky. I am not sure Google would be much better either, there seems to be a lot of “Stuff” out there. However this seemed to return the best results. “IIS URL rewrite config file location ”
Wednesday 29 January
I possibly picked the worst week for Searching… No searches today and its 16:34!
UPDATES TO FOLLOW
Michael is a Technology & Digital Consultant to the Real Estate, Property, Travel and Tourism industies with over 13 Years of leading Technical teams & Programme Management. He has worked with agencies in multiple countries and cities from the UK, New York, Russia, France, Dubai to Australia and South Africa. In his spare time he is a commercial drone pilot that dabbles with Photography & Videography.
