The last few days I utilized the new search engine Bing. I was skeptical at first of the new Microsoft product but was quickly impressed with the raw power of this new “decision” engine as they are branding it. I took notes in search results compared to yahoo and Google and I am going to share some of my insights into what I discovered (and opinions)
1. Bing has a better image search, I like the pop out feature to see the image a bit larger as well as the amount of images that are returned on the first page. It looks like they use “citations” to determine the image and do not have as much focus on alt and title tags. As webmasters have used images as an opportunity to put more keywords into the meta data, Google images has become less relevant.
2. Bing is showing favor to major websites, they are not showing site links except for major websites (ie. starbucks) and to extend that a bit further- less weight on blogs. On Yahoo and Google blogs have been a way to come up for more keywords and they have tended to put more weight on blogs in general.
3. Map feature on local business listings is cool +2 points.
4. The video search is pretty cool and looks like it is integrated into Hulu (competitor of Youtube). Surprise Surprise if the same video is on my space and youtube- Myspace appears to be ranking first.
5. An issue that Bing will have to overcome is the speed of their spiders. Yahoo and Google are very quick to reindex on a regular basis, in todays world we expect current relevant data and I found a few instances where the updated page had not been reindexed to reflect the content changes (which would affect its rankings).
6. Final Note is that this could kill Yahoo, which lately has been showing results that were not relevant to my terms. Example- It brought up eight, I say again 8 of them were spam or Godaddy parking pages. I am not sure why either of those are ranking?
Here are two of the new ads for Bing that showed up on YouTube a few days ago-