Not Impressed With Bing.com

Microsoft has just launched Bing.com, its long anticipated Google killer. To have any chance of succeeding it needs to provide more accurate and relevant results in a more intuitive user interface.

So does it achieve this?

The first search I naturally undertook was for my company name, SubHub. I’m very familiar with how the other search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN handle this search and what results they return, so it offers a fair comparison.

I typed SubHub into the Bing.com search field and the results came back instantly. In terms of speed it is equal to Google and the other search engines. I would give it nine out of ten for speed.

However the first result listed on the results page, under ‘Best Match’, came up with an extended entry for StubHub, a ticket sales website with a ‘t’ in its name.

Bing.com had made the immediate assumption that I had misspelt the word I was looking for. In this situation Google provides results for what I actually typed, whist discreetly asking whether I got the search phrase right by suggesting an alternative.  

This assumption of user incompetence impacts the rest of the results. The related searches on the left hand side are all related to buying tickets and six out of the remaining nine results are also links to StubHub pages.

There is no way for me to correct the assumption that Bing.com has made about the misspelling, so I’m stuck with pages of irrelevant results.

So, for accuracy and relevance I would award Bing.com one out of ten.

How about the user interface?

It is simple and clean, but offers no real benefits over Google. If you mouseover the results, further information is provided in a pop-up bubble, but the extra detail is not particularly good.

With images and video there are more results on the first page, but are they better than Google? . . . No.

So, for Bing's user interface, I would give it a five out of ten because of a lack of any real innovation.

Overall I would give Bing four out of ten.

Making the assumption that your users are stupid and can’t spell is a risky direction for a search engine to take. To then not allow the user to confirm that what they had typed was what they were looking for is an even bigger mistake. It ensures inaccurate and irrelevant results remain that way.

Google killer? I don’t think so! The guys and girls at Microsoft will need to do a lot better than this to make many people switch from Google, and the first step they should take is to stop assuming their users are stupid!