Microsoft Bing was recently released. Early reviews suggested that it was an enormous improvement over the original MSN based search, as well as an improvement over Microsoft’s Live Search.
Although many reviewers reserved judgment about whether Bing was better than Google, a few search engine reviews were so bold as to claim that Bing was equal to Google Search. No major reviewer would make the claim that Bing was better than Google Search. All of which begs the question, "Why should anyone bother to switch?"
One possible motivator is privacy. Google keeps user’s search data for 90 days. But, that isn’t all that Google collects. Google Ads have been installed an countless websites around the web, each of which potentially collects another data point about you and your Internet habits. Google Analytics has been installed on even more websites resulting in yet another potential collection. In short, Google can already see you coming and going, maybe it would be best to perform your searches somewhere else, if another search engine was just as good as Google searches.
Unfortunately, Bing is not as good as Google Search. I haven’t performed any tests, and I haven’t bothered reading anyone else’s tests or searching reviews, or search engine results. I don’t have to. I can tell you that Microsoft Bing is not as good as Google Search without performing a single search query.
How?
Microsoft’s Bing search service offers no method to restrict your searches by date. The lack of a time restricted search is just one reason I never took Live Search seriously either.
Nothing knocks quite as much web spam off the first page of search results like restricting a search to the past month, or past year. Sites looking to snooker you into clicking to see their ad-filled pages built up high-ranking sites and then move on. Revisiting those pages risks unintentionally making edits which lowers the search engine ranking.
More importantly, there are numerous topics for which information that is two years old is no longer accurate. Things like taxes, computer programs, electronics, media, real estate, investing, jobs and careers, and even fields like medicine can have important changes that take what was once true and make it inaccurate, at best, and completely false at worst.
Without a way to limit your searches by time, there is no way to know if the information you find is out of date, unless you already know something about what you are searching for. Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of a search engine?
After all, if you know something about what you are searching for, you might already have a good idea where to find some good information.
In "News" searches only, you can choose to sort by most recent instead of by best match. Of course, that trades one issue for another. Instead of having to wade through the search engine results of a regular web search to find links that a recent, you get to comb through the results by date looking for ones that are relevant. Neither choice is worth doing.
Think I’m exaggerating? Maybe you’re curious about Microsoft’s current search efforts, but you aren’t a huge techie and you don’t know what this year’s search engine is named.
Try this search on Bing: "microsoft search engine"
Actual Screenshot from Microsoft Bing 7/29/09
That 3rd result about "Microsoft’s New Search Engine" looks promising, doesn’t it? (Too bad it’s about Microsoft’s previous search engine. Oh, wait. It is actually about the attempt BEFORE the last attempt! In fact, it is about the beta release of Microsoft’s MSN search engine at search.msn.com! If you’re wondering that is from 2004, five years ago.
Google recently rolled out a "More Options" link on every search page that allows you to use time-based criteria easier and more effectively for any search. Before that innovation, Google allowed you to search within a specific time frame from its "Advanced Search" screen.
In other words, Google has offered date based searching for a long time. Microsoft, a company that has made its entire living off of playing copy cat to other’s innovations, missed the boat on this particular feature. Or, perhaps, they are simply incapable of delivering such queries and results at this time. Either way, the lack of date based searching makes MS Bing a non-starter for this user before a single search is performed.
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I use both Bing and Google search engine and i dont see much difference in their search results. I use google for searching hard to find academic topics and Bing for general search.
i think that Bing is not as good as Google. Google would still index new websites faster than Bing. Microsoft would still need a lot of catching to do with GoogleBot.
my default search engine is Yahoo but now i am using BING because it is much better than Yahoo. i heard that Bing search engine would power Yahoo search also.
BING search engine is just as good as Google. In my own personal experience, Google does give more releveant search result than Bing but the difference is very small. **
But Bing still has no way to restrict results by date. As long as the results it returns are “close”, either ahead or behind, missing that feature makes it much less usable for all manner of things.
my initial test result shows that Bing is as good as Google when displaying relevant search results. Google might be having a tough competitor with Microsofts own search engine.