Wow. Since my last post here, near the start of this thread, I was amazed to see you were all still discussing this product after all this time. At least now it has been released & there is actually something to review!
I was rather cynical about the idea of this new search engine for a few main reasons;
Firstly, if it's produced by the same Micro$oft team who came up with their Live Search, it bound to be a waste of time. That engine was hopeless at finding anything, & had clunky facilities. Even after Micro$oft poured money in to bribing people to use it (
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/13/microsoft_search_bribe_spin/) Live Search still had very few genuine users.
Secondly, whilst the concept of organised results ("decision engine" Lol) at first seems like it might be a good one, for me the facility doesn't provide anything that I can't already achieve better by using Advanced, filtered search in Google. In fact, I'm sceptical that this is more likely going to be used as a method by Micro$oft to show us the selected results & adverts that it wants to. And don't forget that it owns Ciao, which is displayed for all your Shopping search results.
So, I've given Bing a good testing out now, & here's what I've found so far ;
What's with the background photo? It's all very nice but it'll just waste my & their bandwidth.
In the Extras, Preferences menu, the location it displays me as being at is nowhere near my actual location, & I've got a genuine, fairly static IP address (how close is the result for you?)
Bing is labelled as "Beta" - just like most Google products (Gmail is still in Beta after ~5 years!) Perhaps they think this'll make them more like Google?!
Here's my standard search engine quality indicator test :
--If I search for the best servicing & installation company in the South West of the UK
using the string
"video and audio installs plymouth" in Google.com it appears as about the 14th result (in Google.co.uk it appears at the top)
--However, if I do the same search in Bing, it doesn't appear at all!
The name is "Bing" - who cares. Call it want they want, that doesn't bother me.
The product is by Micro$oft - big :thumbsdow .
That said, I think any competition with Google's monopoly can only be a good thing, & I hope that after (lots of) further development & refinement by Micro$oft, Bing might actually be occasionally useful.
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