Forum Moderators: phranque
The times I've used Bing, it seems pretty good. But really how good is it?
So,
For the entire month of December, I will do all my searching at Bing.
How will this change my search habits, and my experience of the web?
Will I find what I need to find?
Anyone want to join me for a month-long Bingathon?
This is NOT a sponsored endorsement of Bing. Honest. Microsoft does not own me
Chrome's homepage and default search set to Bing
irony alert!
=8)
We use Bing as default for some time now. We avoid web pages with Google products on it. We stop communicating with GMail users and make them aware of the problems we see with Google. Stop using Adwords. Remove Adsense from our sites. I've had enough.
But realistically speaking - the results are almost the same - daughter loves the Bing video rollovers (so less searching needed) and we can all find what we want with less Wiki rubbish.
The only thing I struggle with sometimes is speciality items when I am looking for advertisers - but that will come.
Maybe Bing needs to put 10 x $1million prizes for users, that would soon get more PR than paying the direct ad route, and would get some buzz going... or maybe 2 x $1m per country making the Press about Bing more specific and ensuring users don;t assume they're competing with US users. A Golden Wonka type promo.
At least this would get the media talking positively, in the UK most presenter-types still say they are googling like it's something special and really hip - go figure losers...
quick 5 min 'time out' and she most definitely Bings nowyou just made me snarf my coffee! hahahahaha
I *ALMOST* used [the G word] this morning. Their tanslation tool was open in an iframe. eek! close call! And of course I've been seeing AdSense all over the place but that doesn't count as long as I don't click on them.
Instead of [the G word] Translate, I used this:
[microsofttranslator.com...]
and it delivered a plausible translation for the phrase I needed. Of course I don't really know if it was perfect because my Spanish grammar isn't very good. Can anyone confirm whether this is grammatically proper?
no hay cucarachas en la sopa
In fact, I liked microsofttranslator better for one reason: it auto-detected that my origin phrase was in English. That was a nice thing for them to do.
The big surprise was that Yahoo was better than I remembered - on par with Bing. Its a ity its closing.
If you do a search on say red widgets, and only include sites from that region - and it's a search that shows other suggested searches, then Bing shows only the top 5 results. Below the top 5 results there's a 'see more' results type of link, then the top 5 search results for other related searches.
Now if you click on the more results buttong to see results 6+, you lose the 'only show regional results' setting and go back to showing worldwide results.
So you search on red widgets, and only display results for a specific country. Up come the top 5 results in your country. YOu click through to see results 6, you don't get results 6+ from your country, you get all the results worldwide again. Not good. In fact, it's downright annoying. Seems like a pretty straightforward fix but it's been there for months, and I've notified them too.
Nice wheel, this needs some spreading around...I'm adding around as well.
I asked them if they thought that was air they were breathing.
Mack.
Other than that it all worked fine - the results were very good apart from for the PHP manual. Importantly all of the navigation I wanted to look at appeared as soon as the page loaded which these days is a brilliant achievement. I'm pleased to see an increase in Bing referrals in my logs too.
