Go Bing Yourself

There's no disputing that as of right now, Google is the supreme ruler of the search engine world. It's very name has been added to the dictionary as a word meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information... on the World Wide Web." (Not to be confused with googol, which is a number that is 1 with 100 zeros after it.) With additional competition from Yahoo and Ask.com, Microsoft decided its LiveSearch needed a bit of revamping in order to rise to the top. So, LiveSearch was renamed Bing, and Microsoft launched a massive promotional campaign for it. Suffice to say, its first attempt was a little... ambitious.

The spot, entitled "Manifesto," essentially implies that if we only had Bing months ago, we would have avoided the global economic crisis. Not surprisingly, this spot didn't last too long before being replaced with the Syndrome spots which show people asking friends and family some innocuous question only to have them go on an uncontrollable stream of consciousness rant.

Microsoft has essentially been flooding TV space with their ads, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, one commercial break on the June 11 Daily Show started with an ad for the Snuggie only to suddenly blaze through two minutes worth of "As Seen on TV" ads in 30 seconds to reveal itself as message by Bing on information overload.

But does it really work better than Google? Over the past week i've been testing it out by using both Bing and Google whenever I had something really random to look up, but before I did that, I did what most people would do. I looked myself up.

I just want to say that while "googling" oneself sounds like a perfectly adequate expression, to "bing" oneself sounds strangely vulgar. That being said, as of this writing, the top three results of a Google search of me are my LinkedIn page, a drawing I submitted to my college art magazine and this here blog.

Bing, on the other hand, brings up a page worth of links to sites for Allister brand garage door openers and other garage door openers made and sold by Sears. So, should any prospective employers or potential stalkers out there (not the same people, I hope) be trying to find any information about me, they're not going to be anywhere near what they're looking for.

As for my other searches? Either there was no noticeable difference, or Bing dropped the ball. When I tried to look up info on the new Zelda game mentioned at E3, Google led me straight to articles about the latest news. Bing's top three results were two articles back from 2008 when another Zelda was not even a rumor but something we hoped for, and Nintendo's official page for the existing Zelda games.

I looked up to see if the 2010 VW Passat was expected to come out any time soon. Google led me straight to an article about how VW planned to give the model a major redesign, but that it wouldn't come out until 2011 or 2012. Bing led me to a lot of articles about the '09 Passat, most of them being about spare parts for sale, but nothing on the release date of the next model.

Most other searches either had Google directing me more towards the information I was looking for, or both sites directing me towards equally quasi-relevant information. It seems that whether Bing is just a rebranding of LiveSearch or it actually uses different technology, I have yet to see it offer anything that vastly improves upon what Google already has to offer. I'll probably check back to it every now and then just like I occasionally check Yahoo or Ask.com if I can't find what I want on Google, but for now I think I'm going to stick with the big G.