Bouncing back into action with bing
So I haven’t posted in a while, and before I left off, I wanted to discuss Bing vs Google, from my perspective. I ended up using Bing for over a month rather than 2 weeks as initially planned and this is a summary of what I found.
For general searches (looking up websites, searching for names of places, etc) Bing did fine. I found what I needed and most of the time the site I was looking for was among the first few results, as the case tends to be with Google searches. For technical content however, I quite often found that what I was looking for wasn’t on the first page. Upon looking the same query on google, I’d find a much better results set, especially with niche topics, such as the Player-Stage robotics studio that I have been developing with. For such topics, Google far outshone Bing in my experience.
The one place Bing does great however, is images. Bing’s image search page uses ajax to allow you to keep scrolling down for more images, and they are loaded up as needed. This reduces the need to jump from page to page, as is the case with Google image search. Like Google searches, Bing has some filters that can be used to narrow your search down. It also has, -unlike- Google, some recommendations relevant to the type of search. For example, if you search for “Jay-Z” under images, it offers you a list of “related people” that is fairly accurate in the searches I performed. Whether this is actually useful to you or not largely depends on what you use image searches for.
