So Bing is out, so I decided to give it a quick try before I quit for the evening. So I ran the last 3 searches that I did (only one of them was actually an all-web search, but I ran all of them anyway), and the results were quite interesting. They reminded me of the company that is behind this:
1. scalaz (the only web search): Bing thought I misspelled "scalar" and returned only "scalar" query results. There was a small link that I could press to return only "scalaz" results, which when I clicked worked ok.
2. java posse: The first hit was the website I was looking for. However, when you look at the "special internal links" you see "January", "February", etc. What are they? Links to some months of the show (it's actually a blog), but it doesn't contain the year, so not that useful. Also it doesn't contain all the months, just a random select few.
3. snooth cork'd: Again it tried to rewrite my query and use "smooth cork'd", which was quite odd. What I was trying to get is a traffic comparison between both wine organizer/social network sites. The best answer that I found? Wolfram|Alpha!
As you can see, there is an underlying common pattern here: more than Google, Bing tries to predict what you really want and, consequently, will get more things wrong. That's why Microsoft Office is so annoying sometimes. Maybe it's the same engineers that now moved to Bing! :-)
Some other day I'll spend more time on this analysis and find Bing's strengths.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
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