I took the Bing Challenge and Bing … didn’t win. Google beat them 4 to 1.
Bing has a prettier results page, but it got some things wrong. I searched for “Improv Spokane” and I got a beautiful map of major Home Improvement stores in Spokane Washington. I know the improv scene in Spokane and I would have expected to see the Blue Door Theatre in the top 3 of that search. It was #1 with Google (and Yahoo!), but below the fold on Bing. Bing did do a better job on “Improv Seattle”.
On the other 4 searches, Bing did an acceptable job, I did vote for Google for all but “Gracie Allen”, but I wouldn’t have been disappointed with any of the 3 other results. To me it feels as if Bing is focusing on the most popular results and going down from there. With its ten years or so head start, Google has built a giant pile of data and logic.
Since I’m a contractor at Microsoft right now, I actually use Bing a fair amount: 90% at work and 25% at home. Even before I got my current job I used Bing 20% of the time. Bing is slowly getting better and that’s a good thing. We need more than Google in the popular search space.
