BING

Bing
was the technology event of the week. Bing is Microsoft latest attempt to compete with Google. Google of course has dominated the web search market for some time. So from a CTO's point of view how does Bing compare? The search features are somewhat better, and it seems to give results closer to the information that I was after. Bing is definitely good enough so that people will go and check it out, given that it is Microsoft. But that is not the real question.

The real question is, is it good enough to get people to switch their default search tool from Google over to Bing. I will answer that first by stating what I have done, and then my projection.

Between office and home I use a collection of computers. I have and use both IE and Firefox. So far I have only set one of the IE to point to Bing. But that is more to see how it does that anything else. The Bing splash screen is nice with the changing daily pictures. And the search results seem to be a little tighter. But I still haven't set the rest of my browser over.

For the projection: Both Google and MS are psudo-monopolies, and neither one product is dramatically better than the other. But people like to root for the underdog, which gave Google an origal edge over Microsofts previous attemps. But who is the underdog in this case? Yahoo? I project that the search engines will undergo a significant round of improvements.

Google has added many new tools (e.g Google Earth, Blogger, etc) for the web but hasn't improved thier search engine in a long time. Microsoft hasn't had a good search tool up till the recent purchase of FAST to power Bing. Search technology for the web will be taking some significant advances in the near future, with both companies capable of, and needing to make significant investments in the technology.