I think one of the great advantages that Google has isn’t just the strength of its search technology, or the bottom-line deliciousness of adwords / adsense. Its really the thought leadership of what “Search” — and even, probably “The Internet” — means to so many ordinary people.
So much so, (and moreso than say, “Internet Explorer” ever meant to browsers, or Windows ever meant to PCs) that I wonder how many folks are actually going to give Bing a try. Notwithstanding the opinions of reputable technology publications like the New York Daily Post, how much of an uphill climb is Bing’s marketing approach going to be when you’re trying to penetrate some fairly hardened assumptions? And what about Geeks?
Personally some part of it for me is the simple disdain that Microsoft != “cool” (Xbox and its intellectual properties excluded, naturally), and that Microsoft could never really touch the sainted toe lint of Google. And if that isn’t a touch of Google fanboy-ism I dont’ know what is.
Maybe that’s true. It probably isn’t. To that end, I’m going to try and make Bing my default search tool for a couple weeks to try it out. Who knows? The last time I tried making anything my default [whatever] I ended up switching out of Firefox right into Chrome.
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I think what Microsoft has released are smaller, incremental improvements that experienced searchers are already comfortable with. But Microsoft is the one trying to bring this kind of new perspective on search into the light (for the mainstream).
Remember that as Google improves stuff, it rarely tells anyone beyond a blog post. I could be wrong, but I’m guessing the majority of Google searchers probably use Google the same way that they did 5 years ago. That is, even if much has changed in the past 5 years, Google user search habits probably haven’t. (I’m talking about those Google users who aren’t techies/bloggers.)
And you didn’t miss the Firefox plugins ??? I tried to switch … and came back to FF after a week !
@pixgeeks — the only one I really missed was Firebug. I still open up FF for that. Other than that, my casual browsing / searching / researching purposes are satisfied (and more) with Chrome
@Bob — I think you’re right about Google. You’re probably also right about Bing. I think I’m still right about how hard it will be for Bing (or anyone) to penetrate Google’s seemingly unassailable thought leadership on what Search means. ;)
Actually, Google is starting to lose its luster, fast, due to its opaque way of doing business. If you scratch just a little under the surface you’ll see a lot of people who are disappointed with the way Google is using its dominance and unassailable position to trample on people.
Remember, Microsoft was cool in the early days, as cool as Google was when Google was new. Microsoft was this snazzy little startup competing against the established behemoth (IBM).
Well, Microsoft ain’t cool no more, and Google is only cool for those few who aren’t familiar with the ugly mess that is AdWords/AdSense, and who continue to be fooled by the “Do No Evil” slogan. I can’t believe I myself bought that line.
As for Bing, it’s pretty good – extremely fast. I’m rooting for Bing only because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I not only switched my default search engine to Bing, I’m aggressively promoting Bing on all my sites. But I have to say, I never thought I’d see the day I’d be rooting for Microsoft.
I think that bing has a lot of great features but it has a few that strike me as a bit overreaching.
Take for example the playback of videos in the serps. Bing somehow managed to stip all the interstitials (site urls) out of a promotional video we produced.
Also while I like the right side navigation filters I think this also is an attempt to keep surfers in the serps for longer where they can be fed more advertising…essentially I see it as lead recapture for MSN adcenter.
my thoughts on right side navigation/filtering: “oh whats that we didn’t get it right…maybe you were looking for this?..how about this? is this what you were looking for…no…try this then?” all the while showing you new ads with each filter.
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