A Second look at Bing

In comparing the three search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo; one finds very similar results between the three. The landing page for Google and Bing are quite austere in their presentation—waiting for the user to search for content before populating the pages. Yahoo, by comparison appears as more a portal than search engine with current news topics including trending items, weather and stock information. Using a sample search of Allstate, all three sites offer a map of local Allstate agents and advertisements related to Allstate. Bing added more social media information to the results page by displaying mentions of Allstate from Facebook and Twitter. Bing does an impressive job of integrating social media. I searched on Toronto knowing I had a Facebook friend send me pictures of Toronto recently. With the linked account, the search results showed pictures of Toronto that my friend posted. That is a very nice feature! I did not see an equivalent feature on Google or Yahoo. I would maintain that Google is still a more complete search engine. 1000 engineers dedicated to the problem of searching data trump the late entry of Bing. Yahoo as a company still lacks focus and seems hard-pressed to know what it wants to be when it grows up. I will admit that the semantic search features of Bing deserve a second look at the site, but I will still retreat to Google for searching obscure information on the Internet.