Webupon

I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials or any of Microsoft’s other barrage of advertising for their new search engine Bing.com. With all this hype, I was excited to see a game-changing engine like Google was when it first appeared.

Perhaps the hype spoiled my expectations because I was simple disappointed with what I saw. Firstly, if you are going to compete with such a massive hit like Google search you had better have a substantially better product. Bing can only compete with Google is it is different from it in every way imaginable. Google search is in our browsers, on websites, on start-up pages. People will not switch from the convenience of Google for marginal improvements.

Of course the big feature being pimped by Microsoft is that they sort your search results. Well whoop-de-doo, it is not like I could not do that myself. A simple search for “dog” brings suggestions for breeders and diseases. If I wanted to find information of those topics I would’ve searched for it but no, I just want to see some dogs. These categories are listed on the left side and to me feel like a waste of space. The rest of the page plays just like a Google results page with sponsored sites on the right-hand column.

Furthermore, Microsoft does not have the open source cred that Google has, resulting in many more add-ins that can be used to improve and customize Google search. For example, the site previews and traffic stats are a nice touch on Bing but I already have those features from Firefox add-ins for Google.

I believe that Microsoft has no intention of overtaking Google. They were just trying to get in on the lucrative advertising business. Live Search was never really that popular and this is purely a re-branding with some bells and whistles (albeit Google’s bells and whistles) added on. This just goes to show that once again, Microsoft is unable to be that innovative, revolutionary company that they once were in the DOS days of computing.