Bing reviewed: it doesn’t work
Well, my flirtation with Bing – the so-called Google killer – was short. One search in fact.
I just spotted a tweet from Paul Fisher of the Interactive Advertising Bureau that it was live so jumped on.
I offered it an ego search to start off with.
I ticked the box labelled “only from Australia” and Googled (oops, sorry – force of habit) Binged (bung?) the word Mumbrella.
Can you guess what web site it doesn’t list? A little clue: It begins with Mumbrella and ends in .com.au.
I think I’ll be sticking with Google, thanks very much.
Tim Burrowes
Linkedin
Something up with the geo-tagging? Plenty of action if you “show all”.
That aside, I’m liking the innovations to the search platform. It’s been a pretty lonely road for a few years now… Competition can only be a good thing.
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this is indicative of a key issue for any search competitor … it has to be faultless at launch because you only get one shot with 99% of people.
people are much more tolerant of google serving up average results (rare but it happens) as they have built up so much trust
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And by the way, Ben. I will give it another shot.
Although I’m amused to see this result, I’m prepared to accept this is first-few-hours, still-switching-on teething problems. (it could be related to our host being US-based, but that shouldn’t impact on the searcher if the domain is .com.au)
But I know it will leave me wondering what I’m missing out on when I look for Aussie content.
Cheers,
Tim
Tim,
As Shaggy sang “it wasn’t me”!! There is another Paul Fisher on twitter, nothing to do with the CEO of IAB Australia.
To deconflict, we changed @PaulFisher_IAB to @IABAustralia
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SEO bitch! hahah
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Hey Tim,
If you go to http://www.bing.com.au and then type in Mumbrella you are the first two results shown.
Unfortunately geotargeting is a big flaw for all search engines. I have spent a huge amount of work on SEO and even Google doesn’t show many Australian sites and in some cases and I have to manually submit them.
Cheers
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Hi Martin,
I realise it’s visible if I click to search the whole of the web. It just strikes me that it would be something of a bonus if people checking the Australian sites option can actually see, you know, Australian sites.
Perhaps that’ll be in version 2.0.
And Paul – you mean all those insightful and intelligent tweets I’ve been following weren’t you…?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
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There seems to be a pretty big difference between the Australian and US version of BING. It appears that at this stage, the US version is a lot more feature packed than the AU version.
I’ll be giving it chance.
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Yes sadly, I don’t understand the thinking about less features available from day 1 in markets like Australia where they have almost no market share and therefore should be doing much more to differentiate from Google.
Live search only has around 3% market share in Australia so you would think that rather than launch a version which has less features than the US version and some other countries they would launch something which was on par with the US or better to try and attract users!!!
If you launch something here with less features than the US how on earth is that going to get even just a small amount of the 92% market share form Google?
More competitive markets means you need much more differentiation from the competitor, not LESS.
Anyway, that would be my strategic approach.
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That’s what you get for going with the cheap offshore hosting, Tim.
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I used to use AltaVista until it became unfashionable. Then there was “ask jeeves”, which never really worked.
I cant say im too impressed with this latest offer.
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Well, it still is a beta version, so we have to take that into consideration. If in the future there is a “google scholar” feature, I may consider using it. But right now it just works like any ordinary search engine. Have no reason to switch just yet.
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We need some good competition to Google. Lets hope Bing and the Microsoft $$ behind it can get them somewhere close to that goal!
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I think maybe Bing is like Wolfram Alpha – much hyped and not really very good unless you’re in the USA. (I blogged about Wolfram Alpha’s much-vaunted ‘only truth’ results being wrong about a week ago.)
Bing also comes pre-censored, you have to switch their censorship tool off in your preferences. If you switch your country code to India, you can avoid any sex at all, it’s automatically censored for that country. Search for “porn” with India as your location, and you get “The search porn may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms” and that’s it. lol. No results at all.
At the moment (according to articles i’ve read), Bing is stealing hits from Livesearch – who used that? People who couldn’t find their way off the nine msn website once they logged out of hotmail? Microsoft employees who were under orders? People who like microsoft? Yep, 3% of users in australia, as was said above, lol.
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BING = Because Its Not Google..
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First, Lauren I love the acronym.
Tim, apart from geo-coding issues, new search engines need crawlers to populate them and that can take some time. Given that “all” has you in top place I think I’d be doing so internal digging first.
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I think they do have several points of differentiation from Google in the SERPs. Firstly they have placed related search terms in the top left corner, this maybe more useful to searchers to really help them find what they are searching for.
Secondly, the text preview of the web page can provide you a little more content so the searcher can determine relevance before leaving the search results.
You have to expect the development of the Australian bing to be behind that of the US and the UK for that matter. Australia does not have the power to pull any more attention when our entire population is the equivalent to a US city.
As mentioned by Andy, Google really does need a solid competitor and it does need to be soon. Otherwise what will happen if Google controls 100% of the worldwide market?
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