Brock Press

Issue date: 6/9/09 Section: Technology

You've probably heard, but if you haven't, Microsoft has launched a new search engine to compete with Google.
They are throwing a tonne of marketing money behind the project and have high hopes for the engine's success in taking a bite out of Google's market share.
I thought it would be interesting to compare the new search engine, Bing, with ol' faithful: Google.
I decided I would use both search engines for a variety of purposes and document and compare a variety of characteristics of each. Before I get into the actual review, I should mention that the items I was searching for were selected for their relevance to the average user, as well as the belief that they would take some level of searching - that is to say, could not just be easily found on Wikipedia - however as it turns out, that is easier said than done.

Presentation
Google's famous white homepage, with simply the Google logo, the search box and a few links make it simple to use and clutter free. Bing has replicated the simple homepage of Google except for one very obvious difference: Bing's background, rather than white, is a photograph. The photo is updated daily and from what I've seen so far, is usually spectacular and worthy of a few moments inspection before even moving onto typing in your search query.
Microsoft has taken Google's easy-to-use layout and given it an aesthetic upgrade. The beautiful photos make the Web site a great candidate for a user's homepage and gives Bing an advantage over Google before I even begin typing.

Web Search
I decided that I would use both search engines to look up whether their was any sort of world championship of euchre and if there is, what information I could learn about it. I typed "world championship of euchre" without the quotes into both Google and Bing. A quick glance of the first page of results for both engines didn't seem promising as both consisted mostly of links to download euchre programs. However, the seventh result from Google sounded good at first, but turned out to be a homemade (Geocities) Web site listing the winner of an annual euchre tournament between friends from 1976 to 2008. An impressive tradition indeed, but not what I was looking for.
I tried the same search, "world championship of euchre" but this time I included the quotations. Bing only produced one result: the MySpace page of a 26-year old male from Rochester named Ryan. Google produced five results, none of which were relevant, however I was glad to see my friend Ryan was fourth on the list.

Continued...

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