Thursday, June 25, 2009

What is Bing bringing to the table?

The search engine wars have heated up recently with Microsoft's Bing joining the game. Make no mistake, Microsoft is trying to take Google down and is putting some major money and resources behind it, ie. the creative team that basically stole the Google "concept" of using a distinct sounding, simple name for a search engine. Can you imagine if they named it Supercalifragilisticexpealidocious? Anyways, Microsoft seems to be pleased with the early results and are calling it a success so far.

As we all know, humans are creatures of habit and the habit for most humans the past number of years has been to log onto Google when needing to find anything online. How is Bing going to change people's habits? One way would be to make their search engine different, and I know that Microsoft probably has different bots that run behind the scenes and filter results, etc., etc. But 90% of people don't really know how a search engine works, or really care to find out. They want something that that provides value to them that they can see/use. Now in their latest advertisements (which are actually pretty good) Bing makes itself seem like it is different, calling itself a decision engine and adding an airplane, shopping cart, buildings, and medical symbol next to its logo........ohhhhkay. Don't really understand the significance of those but i'll let you run with it. Here's one of the commercials



What does a decision engine get me? Let's go to Bing to check it out. Okay i'll type in Hawaii Tickets as per their commercial. Bing! Make my decision for me decision engine.......oh. The results are pretty typical of Google's. Hmmm. Thats not really following through on your promise, or maybe you just haven't explained well enough what makes your search engine a "Decision" engine. Might want to think about that, or at least explain it somewhere on your page. Just a thought.

I wonder what "Decision Engine" even means, I think i'll Google it.

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