Idle : Bing Stomps Google.

posted 2009.06.29 at 00:25

Not Shown : It took Dogpile to find the third page, though it remained clueless about the first two. Half a point to Yahoo.

Yeah, I could find all CMS entries made on the fourth of July without using an external search engine... but in a week I'll need to do it in the new MT and the old. And until then, I'd get back everything posted in April of 2007. Google's always had a pissy attitude towards ATC, and its decision a couple of months ago that "solios" is a plural of "solio" has added more keystrokes to all future non-Bing googlebating... and that's hardly a step forward. Especially given that I have to throw in a -matrox and a -carbone and a -genga already. While that skeeved me, the Bing buzz made me curious... and lo and behold - Google gave me the finger and Bing gave me what I was looking for. Dogpile - through Yahoo - gave me one bit Bing didn't pick up on, which is also a bit Google considers irrelevant. Neither Google nor Dogpile caught the bits that Bing caught.*

Try it yourself.

GMail kicks ass. While it's not as ego-friendly as Webalizer, Google Analytics is a hell of a lot more featureful, and that's handy. Search... well, Search isn't anywhere near as omnipotent as the media would like us to believe. It just - by and large - sucks so much less than what has come before it.

Now there's Bing, which - SO FAR - is vastly more "do what I mean" than Google Search has ever been.

Maybe one of these days one of these engines will hit a point where it'll be able to tell me all about every single thing I've left on the internet. DWIM has one hell of a measurable impact on the user experience - I don't care how much pride you take in your bad ass algorithms, your server farms, your IPO... if one search engine gives me What I Want more than another does, I'm not going to wallow in brand loyalty. It's software. There's no such thing as "good" software - only software that sucks less. The only reason to stick with software that sucks is file format (or file system) lock-in, which isn't an issue when it comes to searching the intertub.

For at least one thing, Bing has pulverized Google.

Suck it, Stanford.

* This means that for serious rubbing-it-raw googlebating, you're now using at least three different websites. Progress!