4) And, no doubt there's a big
"you like what you're used to" factor at play. If I'd been using Bing for years and had never heard of Google, I might find Google's austere look and style "unusual."
5) But overall, sigh,
Bing seemed to leave too much out. At least too much of what I wanted to find. I
mentioned this last summer, when Bing first came out. It still seems to be the case -- for my purposes, in day by day use this week.
Before giving some illustrations, I need to explain a change in my Experimental Technique. After several days' worth of looking for things only on Bing, I had a nagging feeling that I wasn't getting the whole story. So rather than just give up and go to Google, I turned to the inspired site
Bing-vs-Google.com, which gives you side-by-side results for the same search. The illustrations below rely on that comparison:
- I was looking for Gene Weingarten's incredibly wrenching Washington Post
magazine story about infants who died when left in overheated cars. It was the number-one hit when I did a search in Google; it was not on the first page of results with Bing. See the comparison
here.
- I wanted to provide background for Francois Villon's
Ballade des dames du temps jadis. The Google results of a search on "
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan" were just what I was looking for; not so with Bing. See
here.
- I wanted to identify the music in a very brief Chrysler Town and Country ad I'd just seen on TV. Google had it, as the #1 hit; on Bing, it was down below a lot of chaff. See
here. Something similar when I was looking for the music from a Palm Pixi ad,
here.
- I was looking -- online shopping! -- for a case for my invaluable
LiveScribe Pulse magic pen. This is what Bing is supposed to be made for, but the first non-sponsored hit is for a site
that looks pretty fishy to me. Its intro says: "We at livescribepen.net gathered a range of stylish high tech pen now a day; here you can search all kinds of livescribe pen.
You can use it either your in meeting, school, training and at the
office, it's a unique pen that you can count on. If you use the
smartpen your life running smooth to write what you heard." That site -- again, #1 for Bing -- seems to be filtered out of the first few pages of Google. See the comparison
here.
Note: if you click on these Bing-vs-Google links, you may see something different from what I'm reporting here, since the site runs real-time searches of ever-changing content. (I've saved some of the screen shots from my searches but am not posting them here.)
6)
Moral of the story? I mentioned
earlier that after my experiment in writing
an article with voice-recognition software only, I returned happily to the keyboard. I will return happily to Google -- and, no kidding, to Bing-vs-Google.com (or other sites that do the same, like
this and
this). (
UPDATE: and this one,
GoogaWho?, which lets you easily compare results from Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo, InfoSpace, Lycos, AltaVista, and Dogpile.) You never know what you might have missed! There's always more to prowl around for, including that elusive Panama Canal vote.
[Routine disclaimer: I have good friends and a variety of connections at both Microsoft and Google.]