Thursday, July 30, 2009

Sorry Bing

I'm sorry Bing, yesterday I kind of bashed you saying you were nothing more than "Google with a his res image in the background". And I was wrong about how your are marketing yourself, you are claiming to be a "decision engine" which I think is a good concept.

This morning I went to go look up some information on the government trade in program CARS, so I fired up the Google (my home page) and searched away. In one of those "ah ha" moments I realized that for more than any other reason I go to Google out of habit. If there is information on the internet that Google does not pick up (or isn't in the first five search results) I'm never going to see it, and that's not good!

As I'm writing this post I'm on Bing searching for information on CARS and I'm really enjoying some of Bing's features. Check out the search history on the left side of the page which shows I searched for the terms honda fit and cash for clunkers .


Bin'g search history feature is convenient and it was effortless to discover. Google's search history is the weird thing that populates words when you type something in the search bar. It's much easier to just click your previous searches and get the results, no typing involved.

I was really feeling bad about my comments regarding Bing's homepage and I wanted to show something I left out of my previous post. The image in the background on Bing changes (at least every day) and when you move your cursor over certain parts of the image you get little windows which display facts related to the picture and there are links to learn more about the facts.


This little window has a fact about the defeat of Napolean in 1815 and has a link to videos about the battle of Waterloo. At first I thought this was really cheesy and didn't click the link, but the more I scrolled over this the more I realized that I totally wanted to watch a video about an epic historic battle. This feature did not dissapoint, there were tons of interesting videos and articles, and it was a nice way to break up the boring internet search. I can almost see myself getting excited for what tomorrow's picture might be and what I can learn from it. I'm going to give Bing a second chance, I might even make it my home page for a while and hopefully find some new things that Google doesn't offer.

Again I am sorry Bing, I was wrong, you are different from Google and whether you succed or not I should give you credit for trying to do something different.

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