There’s been much hoopla about Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing.  Bloggers all over have been talking about it.  It’s the topic of discussion these days.  This isn’t going to be a review of Bing.  I’m sure you can find hundreds of them anywhere online, written by people scrambling to write about either “the next big thing” or Microsoft’s “next big blunder.”  Take your pick.  There’s plenty of both.

No, what I am going to discuss here is what Bing’s release means for the search world? What does it really mean for the online community? These are the important questions that should be asked by everybody.  “How does it affect me?”

Before we get into all that, let’s slow down and take a look at what Bing really is.  Microsoft, in its press release, said that Bing “was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences.” In other words, Bing was developed to organize the world’s information in online search, because apparently, there’s too much of it currently in online search?  And by “today’s search experiences,” Microsoft is talking about Google, right?

Lofty goals, of course.  Microsoft wants Bing to be the search engine of the future because apparently, Google isn’t good enough.  Using Bing, though, I keep on getting the feeling that there’s nothing here on Bing that isn’t on already on Google, or that isn’t incredibly easy to access on Google.  I guess you can make a case for the travel portion of Bing, but even on Google, just search for travel, flights, even Kayak, and you’ll get the same service that Microsoft is using for Bing.

What it looks like, is that today June 3, 2009, on Bing’s official release date, Microsoft unveiled what looks like an attempt to copy Google, years after Google was released.  Just look at the top bar above your search results, and tell me that it wasn’t copied from Google! Thank you, Microsoft, for giving us what we already have.  You have demonstrated that once again, you are behind the times, and that in every fight, Google will continue to win.

I’m sorry, but even though I tried to keep this from turning into another Bing review, I could not.  I guess Bing was simply destined to be compared to Google at one point.  But don’t take my word for it.  Why don’t you go “Bing and decide.”

Tags: bing, microsoft search engine, microsoft's bing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.