When was the last time you Googled something?
Google has been a household term for nearly a decade, with many people using “Googling” as a synonym for “searching”, evidently, the majority has more than likely “Googled” something in our lifetime. Microsoft has every intention that “Binging” will soon succeed “Googling”, as a result of their recently released search engine- Bing.
Google takes the lead as one of the most widely used search engines with an estimated 2 billion searches a day back in 2008. Bing, however, seems to be creeping up in the ranks with an estimated 150,000,000 searches a day in 2009, according to an online statistic tracker. The two have grown significantly since then.
Google’s search engine dates as far back as 1996. Back then, it was a research project, but quickly developed into an incorporated company in September of 1998. What set Google apart from other search engines was it’s ground breaking Page Rank feature, which ranked the websites in terms of relevance to the search, by the importance of the web page.
Today, Google’s ease of use and quick search feature promises it as the number one used search engine on the Internet.
It’s main competitor is a Microsoft based search engine, called Bing. Bing is a new name to an older engine, MSN Search, which dates back as early as 1998. MSN Search has undergone many updates and changes, the result being many different names to the engine. In June of 2009, they officially renamed the search engine “Bing”. Over a month later, Microsoft partnered with Yahoo! Search Engine for a contracted 10 years, to power Yahoo!’s search engine.
Bing enables a feature of integrating Facebook friends into the search engine.
“Together, Bing and Facebook offer you better search results and a more personalized experience with the help of your Facebook friends” claims Bing on their discoverbing.com help page.
Bing promises to deliver more relevant searches than its counterpart, Google.
Renowned radio and television host, Ryan Seacrest, is endorsed by Bing and promotes it like it’s the new Google.
The name itself is different and chimes itself in as the sound of winning. Popular belief states that BING stands for “But It’s Not Google”.
Times Union lifestyle blogger, Kevin Marshall, begs to differ. Marshall performs about 5 to 10 searches a day, in order to obtain information for his lifestyle blog.
“I’ve found that Bing will give you the results it wants to give you, rather than what you’re looking for. Bing uses this as a selling point, but for someone who actually knows how to locate stuff on the internet, it’s more of an obstruction than anything else.”
“I like it better,” says Sarah Hinman, the News Research Director at the Albany Times Union, “they have a lot of features, such as a good entertainment section. They also have good visuals.”
After doing a comparison search between the two for “Obama quit smoking”, Bing brought my blog post on the Albany Times Union as the third result. Google, listed a story from the Huffington Post.
