Bing without the Crosby
David Weinberger says Microsoft’s Bing is nothing special, in fact a ripoff of Kayak.com. He references a review by Hiawatha Bray…[Link] He says (making some good points)
opens his review with the clever idea of searching for “google” at Bing and for “bing” at Google. He says Bing gives you a concentrated dosage of stuff about Google, while Google is all over the map with its “bing” results. Well, sure! “Google” is a made-up word with only one dominant meaning, so of course Bing gives you concentrated Google goodness. But “Bing” has lots of meanings, so Google’s right to return a mix of bingy words…with Microsoft Bing as the top result. Now, it is true that, as Hiawatha says, Microsoft gives its “Google” results in convenient tabs about Microsoft the corporate entity as well as listing sub-pages within the google domain, while Google’s top return on “Microsoft” only gives you a set of sub-pages. Microsoft looks more like WolframAlpha in that regard, and that’s a good way to look. But, Google also recently added easier ways to refine and expand searches (by timeline, by WonderWheel), etc., as Hiawatha points out. So, it really depends on what you’re trying to do. As always. (Type MSFT into either and you’ll get similar boxed stock data.)
