When you drop a heavy rock in an empty pale you’d probably describe the sound as a bang, but if you drop a penny in an empty pale the sound may be more appropriately described as a bing.
Microsoft decided to rebrand their failed attempts at a search engine this week, calling their new service Bing (www.bing.com), rather than Live Search. I tried it out and kicked the tires a bit and it was decent, I was impressed by the ground Microsoft made in providing a better search experience then they had provided in the past, but I still think they are a ways off from where Google is now, and that they are still playing catch-up. I did however think the image search was nice with the dynamically loaded AJAX page that you can scroll through until it’s loaded all the results instead of having to page through an endless pile of pages.
I still remember the days before Google was around, and the mess that had to be waded through to get any kind of results from a search engine, and Google saved the day. They were the hero then, and I think they have gained the loyalty both with having come to the rescue, and by staying ahead of the crowd. Google has lead inovation in how we find things online. Microsoft has been for a while just playing catchup to the inovation on the web. Microsoft offers just about the same feature set as Google in a lot of ways, but I prefer the experience and simplicity that Google worked hard to maintain. I feel that Microsoft still tries to do too much and thus doesn’t provide as polished a solution.
