Remember Bing?

Yeah, Bing. The Google-killer. The Decision Engine. $100 million marketing budget.

Bing.

12 thoughts on “Remember Bing?

  1. At the community college where I teach, Bing has replaced Google as the service whose search blank shows up in the upper right corner of the browser window. I am hugely UN-impressed with Bing; in spite of its heavily advertised ability to get results more focused on what the searcher is really looking for, I find it actually gets less relevant results, sometimes so totally out in left field, I can’t figure out how the search engine — oh, pardon me, decision engine — came up with them.

    I’ll stick with Bing Crosby. Or bing cherries.

  2. I’m pretty sure that Bing has never crossed my line of sight. I must have been on the receiving end of the wrong half of that there marketing budget, the half that was a waste of money, to misquote someone, Lord Beaverbrook …?
    Take a look at ixquick, I found it when I was looking around for a workable browser I could trust, works a treat.
    Just waiting for the duck to appear now before I submit….. there he goes :-)

  3. After I posted that I went and looked up Bing’s market share. 10%, according to people paid to know. I find that really hard to believe. I had exactly one Bing-driven hit in September. Various Googles brought in just over 1000.

    Maybe that indicates that Bing actually does work better…

  4. I see Bing thrust at me a lot because I do lots of news browsing on msnbc.com and since they are all in a circle jerk, that’s what you get. I was reading about the Samoan Tsunami, and wanted to look at the IRIS seismic monitor. What the heck, I typed in iris seismic in msncb’s bing field and got crap. I typed same into google and got it on the first hit.

    Although I am an anti-fan of microsoft I could actually give bing some fair chances because Google-first-do-no-evil has changed into Google-do-no-evil-except-when-trying-to-get-into-China-market-and-when-trying-to-monopolize-world’s-book-text-searching.

    • Speaking of the Microsoft circle jerk, I went over to Bing to see if there was a way to improve my hit rate with them. They already indexed a subset of my pages, so I submitted a site map to help them out. No discernible effect. Then I saw a section that allows you to analyze your performance against different key words and phrases, similar to a service Google has, except with this one you *must* have Microsoft Excel to use it. Never mind.

  5. I think it’s time for Shatty Baby to change songs. I wanna hear him singin Love is All Around from the Mary Tyler Moore show. Since I will never be lucky enuf to agin be MOH, I have to bat my eyes at TG, and hope she likes the idea. You can even use her voice.

    • The thing is, that actually IS Shatner doing Lucy in the Sky. I also have a recording of him doing Mr. Tambourine Man, and other songs are out there. The reason I use that one is that I could cut and paste it (with the lips already synced) from my very-slowly-progressing Flash sequel to the duck animation.

      • Oh, I didn’t realize – in fact I thought you had said in an earlier entry it was a Prague friend of yours doing the voice. Or was he the source of the recording?

      • Also, this was the thoughts that come from the drunk dialing side of the force. Except this was the Up Half The Night With Sick Baby And Now You Are Full Of Coffee Which You Don’t Normally Drink So You Are Jazzed And Loopy Dialing variety. pL probably has my back on this.

  6. I’m pretty sure that there never will be a “Google killer.” There will be tools that do specific things better, but how do you google better than Google?

    • I needed to look up an article. I knew the article’s title, and I knew the article’s author. I typed both into the Bing search window. The article didn’t show up in the first four screens of search results. I gave up.

      “Decision Engine.” Yeah, right.

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