I can understand this whole brouhaha about Microsoft Bing. But why? Just because there is nothing more happening in the search engine arena. Or is it because people got bored of Google and wanted something new to just talk about or may be even worse, they got carried away by looking at a video of Bing that Microsoft showed just before its release. Whatever may be the reason is, I think Bing is not even close to what is expected from it. Sure it has potential, but mother Microsoft ‘delivered’ baby Bing prematurely which still needs proper ‘incubation’.

The first and the foremost thing is that, the indexing of Microsoft Bing is just like Live Search and don’t ask me whatever happened to Live Search. The interface.. frankly speaking, I didn’t like it. Look at the Bing logo. Utter crap. I mean you’re Microsoft for cryin’ out loud, you made Vista, you made Windows 7, totally mindblowing creations of all time, aesthetics and sense of ergonomics is in your blood and then what happened? Ok. Microsoft wanted to create a search engine and it did. It was lucky enough to create all the hype but now what? I am not interested in seeing a natural scenery in the background while I search. When I search for Maps, I don’t want my place to be shown miles away from the seashore when in fact I live just near the seashore. Yes, the maps search feature of Bing which directs me to Microsoft Virtual Earth has flaws in it. It doesn’t matter much but when it comes from the software giant like Microsoft, it is just not acceptable.

According to the Virtual Earth map shown by Bing and considering the indicator of 5km shown at the bottom right corner, Valsad is approximately 15km away from sea-shore and Tithal (click the picture for larger view) is approximately 10km from the sea-shore. But the fact is, Valsad is just 4.5km and Tithal is just 0.5 km away from sea-shore. Now see what Google has to offer:

According to the indicator shown at the bottom left corner, the scaling and labelling is just perfect. This is called information. Right information. Like as they say “No information at all is better than wrong information”. In fact Bing put forward Microsoft’s flaws in its Virtual Earth. I never used Virtual Earth and may be if it wasn’t for Bing, I would have never known that Microsoft Virtual Earth had flaws.

No, the spanking is not over yet. Let’s now focus on the feature upon which Bing exists: The Search. I appreciate the efforts of Microsoft has put in to ‘see’ into the mind of a user what he really wants but that’s where it went too cheesy and methodical. On the other hand, Google, much more human-like, gives you results not by ‘reading your minds’ but what’s more relevant to you and that is what really a person is searching for. For example: When I typed “jal desai” crud in Bing as well as Google, Bing was totally clueless what I was searching for and gave me no results. Whereas Google, tried hard and brought me two results from my personal blog which had the above words. Bing lost it.

Moreover, Bing came with a bang that everybody thought it would surpass Google. But I don’t see any worth while improvements in Bing. What more disgusting is the Preference settings in Bing. What’s new in that? Turn suggestions on/off, number of results on a page, language, wtf? I have been doing these same old things with Google since ages.

Recently, Bing came under a controversy that pornographic content is very easily accessible through it. So as a caution measure, it disallowed showing results if words like ‘sex’, ‘porn’, etc are searched. This is insane! Instead of filtering the results, it completely blocked the search which blocked even those results that were not so pornographic in nature. Take an example of this blog-post. As I have mentioned words like ‘sex’ and ‘porn’ in this blog post, chances are that this blog-post or even my whole blog won’t show up in Bing. I am sure you understand the fuzziness of such words which cannot be and should not be restricted in just one context.

I have just started using Bing so I may add more to what I have mentioned above. I haven’t still covered the ‘Related Searches’ feature and SEO optimization of websites to list up in Bing. I am sure there is lot more to write but as of now, I am not impressed. I am trying my best to start liking Bing and let Bing impress me just because it is from Microsoft. It is an awesome company, everything about Microsoft is awesome, Billy G is awesome and so is Steve Ballmer. What I do liked about Bing is the video search. It is not so great but it is very handy. However, I would still say that Bing needs to get evolved pretty fast before the downward curve of its popularity begins. As of now: Google rocks and Bing..not good enough!