History will likely judge Google to have been the first reliable search engine. Prior to its launch, using most search engines was akin to digging through a landfill looking for something you inadvertently threw in the trash: inaccurate, time consuming, and messy. But in the Google era, searching the web usually gives you what you’re looking for (or something close to it) within the first page of results. Lately however, Google’s search prowess seems to have plateaued as the rush of new and constantly changing information onto the internet on an up-to-the-minute basis now means that any results more than a few months old tend to be sufficiently outdated as to be wholly inaccurate or useless. For instance, a year-old web page about Barack Obama, which would inform you he’s still a Senator, would only be of value from a historical perspective; otherwise it’s a lot like the old days of going to the library and trying to look something up in last year’s encyclopedia. It’s gotten to the point that I often include “2009” at the end of my search term in an attempt to push more recently published web pages higher in the search results (thanks to Chris Brogan for the tip), and if we can figure out how to manipulate search results to favor timeliness, then why can’t Google?
Microsoft has yet to really deliver anything of any value to society (products like Windows and Word have been massive detriments to society’s progress as a whole, but that’s another story for another day), but the company’s launch of its new “Bing” search engine managed to at least mildly pique my curiosity. Actually there’s nothing new about it; Microsoft has had a search engine for several years that almost no one uses, and so the company periodically changes the search engine’s name (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, etc, etc) and aesthetics in the hope of generating new interest in a perennially ignored product. Still, the launch of Bing seems to have generated far more buzz than any of Microsoft’s past warm-overs of its search engine, so I figured I’d play with it just a bit. Even if it turns out to be a lame flop, its mere existence (and temporary buzz) just might convince Google to stop poking around on sideshows like Android and instead steer their efforts back toward the one thing they’ve ever proven they’re great at: search.
Bing has just launched as a “preview” which means you shouldn’t expect everything to work quite right. Fair enough. But you shouldn’t search for “apples” and get a page full of results about oranges, so to speak. Most people start off by typing their own name into a new search engine to see what comes up, but in my case I’m more interested in the business ramifications so I dutifully typed “iProng” into the search bar so I could ensure that the results Bing delivers for my magazine are at least relatively accurate. In other words, iProng.com should come up first, then probably our official presences on major sites like Facebook and Twitter, followed by major sites that have linked to specific pages of our content, and so on. But here’s the funny thing: searching Bing for “iProng” not only doesn’t deliver iProng.com as the first search result, it doesn’t even come up in the first ten results. In fact it doesn’t come up in the first ten pages of results.
My first thought was that perhaps Bing simply hasn’t finished indexing the entire internet. It would be bizarre for a major commercial search engine to launch in such a fashion, but after all it is labeled as a preview. But when I typed in “iProng.com” into the search bar, sure enough, iProng.com is the first result. That means Bing has in fact found the iProng.com website but doesn’t think it’s in any way relevant to a search for the word “iProng” – a word which, I should point out, is a fictional word that I made up several years ago and has literally no other meaning (in English or any other language) than in direct reference to my publication. In fact, of the first hundred search results Bing delievered for the word iProng, all one hundred of them contain links to the iProng.com website.
Here’s a hint, Microsoft: when someone searches for a brand name that only has one meaning and has only ever been used in direct reference to one specific website, whose URL consists of that particular word, and when the top one hundred results churned out by your algorithm for that particular word all link to that same website, you just might want to include that website somewhere within those top one hundred results. Say, at the very top of those results. Just like Google does. And ask.com and search.yahoo.com and even circa-1995 search engines like AOL Search and Alta Vista, whose search algorithms were probably last updated years before iProng even came into existence. So there you have it, Microsoft: even Dogpile, whose name warns you up front that it’s crap, delivers more accurate results than your shiny new Bing.
But here’s the really fun part. After pointing out on Twitter that Bing can’t figure out that people searching for “iProng” just might be looking for iProng.com, someone else on Twitter countered that by informing me that when she searched for “iProng” on Bin,g her results did in fact show iProng.com as the first result – and provided a screen capture to prove it. Is that one even explainable? The only differential I could find is that I’m in the United States and she’s in Canada. And sure enough, I head over to the Canadian-specific Bing.ca and iProng.com does in fact come up as the first search result. In other words, Bing.ca is ahead of Bing.com. As a side note, Bing shares its name with Chandler Bing, the character from “Friends” played by Matthew Perry – who is in fact Canadian.
My conclusion? Microsoft clearly hates America.
I’ll cut it some slack for still being in beta, but if this one embarrassingly absurd example is any indication of Bing’s agility, then my guess is that the folks over at Google are letting out a collective sigh of relief right now and turning their attention back to their multi-year quest to make webmail somehow magically be something other than the crapfest that it inherently it is. Oh well.
Oh and by the way, now that I’ve visited Bing.ca, my subsequent attempts to using Bing.com ask me if I want my results to be worldwide or “only from Canada” – I’m telling ya, I think I’m onto something here 
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