My wife asked a question the other night after seeing one of Microsoft’s new Bing commercials.  You know the ones; the commercials that really don’t tell us anything useful about Bing, but reflects how awful all other search engines are and how they leave their users interpretting rambling non-sense.

She wondered, “How is it a decision maker? What does it decide for me?”

The question is a valid one.  How is Bing being a “decision maker” any value to me?  What a completely freaking useless description of this new service.  It doesn’t reflect whether the service does anything positive for its users, it just makes decisions; good or bad, useful or not, it decides stuff.  BING!!!

Even though Microsoft’s marketing campaigns continue to bite the big one, Bing still deserves a crack at taking Google down.  Google’s been great, but every champion needs to defend its title against legit challengers in order to retain its status.  So, last week I set Bing as my default Browser in Chrome; you’ve gotta love the irony in that.  I’m going to keep it set this way for the next month or so and then report back on how I feel about Bing compared to Google.

Since it’s the new guy, Bing will need to prove themselves.  And because of that, Bing gets first crack at each search.  If it can’t supply a result that I’m satisfied with, then I’ll jump over to Google to see what its take is on my query.  It’s Bing’s job to avoid this from happening, not Google’s job to prove that it can match or better every search that Bing gets right.  The number that Bing gets right is not the challenge here; it’s how often Google can successfully swoop in and provide a relatively correct result to my query.   I define correctness as a result that is useful within the top 5 to 10 results.

This isn’t a very scientific approach, but it will surely answer for me whether Bing stands up to what we all know Google can do.  After I’ve reached a personal conclusion, I’ll report back with my findings and opinions.  Let’s get it on!