I acknowledge it: I'm a Google-search diehard. Like most reporters and bloggers, I search much more than the average person. And Google has served me nicely when looking for all kinds of obscure data, from executives; new titles, to codenames.I am not adverse to switching search engines like google if there;s a far better 1 out there. Soon after looking through lots of glowing reviews about Bing and admiring the way in which it shown lookup results in a additional intuitive way, I;ve tried employing it.I;m not 1 of these consumers who use a specific search engine from practice. I'm not somebody swayed by brands or who refuses to use technology from a certain vendor to make a point — other than Apple products, but that;s for a whole different set of reasons (most of which echo those articulated by fellow Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott).In using Bing,
Windows 7 Ultimate, I felt any kind of shopping-focused lookup worked nicely. When I was seeking for restaurant details or airfares or the cheapest place to buy a blender, Bing worked like a champ. But when I used Bing to find certain articles I had written, or info about a specific product (not 1 I intended to buy), its outcomes were fair to poor.When Microsoft rolled out Bing this spring and called it a “decision engine,” a lot of of us pooh-poohed the Redmondians; attempt to make a new niche in the search world that wasn;t already dominated by Google. But now I understand greater why Microsoft characterized Bing this way: Microsoft consciously tweaked Bing to be an incredible shopping engine. “Decision engine” was a euphemism for shopping engine.Frederick Savoye, Senior Director of Microsoft;s Online Audience Business, admitted as substantially when I had a chance to ask him recently whether Microsoft had optimized Bing to be a shopping engine. He said the Bing team plans to round out Bing;s lookup capabilities in future iterations. But in this release, Microsoft focused on helping users get the top results for searches that involved spending money — not surprising, given that lookup vendors need to appease not only consumers and developers but also online advertisers.I guess I;ll wait until the next release of Bing to experiment with producing it my default lookup engine. For now, Bing;s good for finding cheap flights, but not so excellent when trying to do research that doesn;t require a credit card.Update: I see Microsoft is telling some folks that I “did some interpretation of my own” about Savoye;s comments. For the record, I asked Savoye whether Bing was optimized to handle shopping queries, as my experience indicated, and he said that was the case. He said Microsoft planned to round out Bing to handle other types of queries with its next release. No one from Microsoft has contacted me to say my post was inaccurate.