Google Instant vs Bing

Friday, September 10th, 2010

In case you haven’t heard the news, Google has radically changed the entire nature of web searching with its new real time and predictive Google Instant service. You can read about it here or see the introductory video or full launch video.

By far the best option is to see it in action yourself. You can do this simply by visiting the main Google.com home page (on google.co.uk you have to sign in to your Google account to switch Instant on) and then starting to type in the search box (assuming that you’re using one of the currently supported browsers: Chrome 5/6, Firefox 3, Safari 5 for Mac and Internet Explorer 8).

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Anglian Windows gets more than it bargained for on Bing

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

By now I expect everyone is familiar with the idea of buying keywords in search engines. Identify a keyword you like, stake your claim to it, and you get a featured listing whenever someone puts that term in the search box.

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

Could Bing be the search engine that kills Google?

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Once upon a time, when Google could declare “We’re not evil” without hundreds of thousands of shareholders to worry about, search engines were just search engines. Now, it appears, they’re not. Microsoft is calling Bing a decision engine, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and Yahoo is… well, let’s not go there.

You could argue Microsoft’s position is born out of desperation. On whatever metric you chose to use, MSN Search (or Windows Live, I lost track of its names in the end) fell behind Google. Number of users, amount of money it made, brand awareness, effectiveness of the raw search – Google kept on winning. (more…)