"But It's Not Google." That's the snarky derivation that Net wags are giving to Microsoft's new Bing search engine. Micro hopes to take yet another run at Google, the monster, killer Web app that has become a global verb. And, according to the New York Times, Steve Ballmer hopes the name will 'verb up,' just like Google did.
Will it work this time? Go to Bing.com (I got there the usual way, by Googling it) and you'll get -- not a search engine, but a video ad for the coming attraction. And here's the promise: Bing doesn't just deliver results, it delivers what you need to make decisions: comparisons, drilldown links, groupings, options.
But wait. Isn't that Yahoo? Before Google, Yahoo was the go-to search page because it provided you with an edited catalog of relevant results. I'd argue that Google beat this not just because its results were more frequently updated, but because they weren't pre-edited. And they were fast. The Google results page can be scanned quickly and easily, then fine-tuned through another lightning-quick search. Users find what they want incrementally through dialog, kind of the way a learning brain likes to work, rather than by being presented with a single, complicated click-splat layout of pre-filtered results. We know where the market went, and where it has stayed.
But then I'm an old geezer. Maybe the kids can handle more stuff on the screen than I can. Maybe they're not incremental, dialog-based searchers. Maybe they like click-splat. Maybe Bing will deliver the bling that MicroSoft is looking for. Maybe.
Good luck.
Your comments on spot on Brad. All I have to say is pull search the same term in both engines and look at the results. Now switch to image search. Who is giving the most relevant answers? That's how you become a verb.
ReplyDeleteSecond thing Microsoft misses is scholar. I know this is a way small minority but I love this feature. Doing serious research on the web is hard. The scholar search is where narrowing results makes sense. And it works.