I’ve tried Bing, on-and-off since its launch. It hasn’t convinced me that it’s much of a decision or knowledge engine. Bing has some nice search features but as far as I can tell nothing particularly game changing.
Its preview side categories, recent searches, etc. have been done before by other search engines including Yahoo, Ask, Google, etc. A lot of Bing’s approach seems to be various ways of presenting search refinements, again not new (alltheweb.com the past days of teoma, and others). Its powerset stuff inside I suppose is important–helps Bing against some of the others (hakia.com) out there, but in the end I don’t seem to get better results than Google gives me and I still find Google’s interface preferable.
In practice Bing doesn’t appear to live up to its release claims of helping me make decisions. I don’t see much to justify Microsoft calling Bing a decision engine, so that must have been more marketing hubris than anything.
If the game is going change perhaps that will come from more interesting experiments like Wolfram|Alpha or an alternate company. Then again, Google continues to innovate and change the search game better than its challengers do.
Hi Josh,
If you’re looking for a fresh take on internet searching, please take a look at this prototype.
http://www.beyondadze.com
The long term goal of the company behind beyondadze is this: The search engines we have at the moment are simple flint tools in comparison with what we really need and what will be available in 10 years time. beyondadze aims to develop a number of specialised search tools that really make a difference to the user’s ability to find relevant information.
Currently, beyondadze has only one tool, but it’s potentially quite a powerful one. ThreeCore was developed to combat the problem of trying to find useful websites (note: websites, not pages). The problem you face if you’re trying to identify a website that has a wealth of high-value information on a range of related topics is that, using the current search engines, as you increase the number of search terms, so the value of the pages they find plummets.
Suppose you’re looking for a number of good articles on medical research. So you type in “medical research cystic fibrosis oncology asthma”. The chances of a single page on the internet having high-value information on all these three topics is very remote.
ThreeCore, beyondadze’s first offering solves this problem.
Take a look and let me know what you think.