On Microsoft's new Bing search engine and Google...

I don't normally have a very good impression of Microsoft. The quality of its products doesn't impress me much. It's releasing security patches so frequently to Windows that sometimes makes me wonder if they subject the patches to enough vigorous testing to patch security holes, or if the patches are making things worse.

I must give it credit though, for its perseverance and its execution. They did it with SQLServer after multiple tries, which now becomes a viable database option that is reasonably priced enough to take the lower end of the market. They did it with Xbox which is coming on fast, to challenge Wii.

Now, it looks like Microsoft could be set to do that again with online search. For a long time, Microsoft's search engine didn't amount to much. For goodness sake, MS even paid people to use their search engine, and it still won't catch on. But its latest search incarnation of Bing looks to change that.

Some years back, I started out with Yahoo (when it's still young). As Yahoo tagged on other stuffs to its page, but its search results were not that much more improved, I switched to Alta Vista. Around 1999, I switched to Google's search engine was still young, but it gave me more relevant results than others, including Northern Light. Google had proved itself to provide better (and more relevant) results than other search engines on the market at the time. And it has stayed that way for pretty much the past 10 years.

While Google has done some good work (eg. Gmail), but there's this worrisome trend that Google has become too big and almost monopolistic. It's outrageous that Google is even asking artist to provide work and content to them for free, in exchange for exposure. For a long time now, I've found the search results from Google to be getting more irrelevant, with more junk links. See, I need to search for technical stuffs, and I don't have time for white noise from search results.

When Bing came out couple of weeks ago, I gave it a go. Surprisingly, I found completely different set of search results from say, ClassNotFoundException, than what Google would find. You can't believe how happy I was. I thought out loud, that for once, I can find more results other than what Google can feed me. I've decided to use Bing, alongside Google, if not replacing it outright. I don't like monopoly afterall. It's always better to have more competition than none at all.

It is perhaps fitting, that Google is now getting worried, for the kind of good word of mouth of Bing. Google's founder is even assembling teams of specialist to study Bing. While the jury is still out, I find it good, that we have five different search engines, yielding different sets of results to me, instead of one.

And I'm happy the 700-pound gorilla of Google is getting scared. :)