Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, went live last night. I haven't had a chance to run any tests comparing it to Google, but a simple search or two suggests that it will likely produce comparable results.
I'm certainly pleased that it knows that a search for "slaw" should cause our site to rise to the top of the results pack:
If you hover your cursor over a search result, a graphic appears to the right, and hovering over that brings up a popup with text from a (recent? latest indexed?) sample page — but not necessarily, it would seem, more of the text from the result you hovered over. MS needs to clarify this, and, I'd say, make the feature more obvious.
I have to wonder why even a company as powerful as Microsoft would fling itself at a market that is so ably occupied by a giant that works, and works well. It's one thing to try to solve the natural language search market (Powerset), or to aim to provide detailed answers to difficult questions (Wolfram/Alpha); but to compete with Google and Yahoo! for a piece of the general search market seems not worth the effort. Still, search engines keep getting created (and failing: Cuil): there's a new one, Blekko, now in stealth mode, so it's unclear whether it's a straight-ahead search-the-web project or something seeking a niche.
Here's a site that shows Google vs Bing results side by side. http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/search.php
it seems like Microsoft is having a search engine identity crisis
Comparable, but not quite the same. I've done a little playing around and there is some variation. The real challenge won't be figuring out targeted name searches like Slaw, but rather content driven queries that hopefully lead here.
I'm only slightly concerned about having to learn another SEO paradigm, but will invest that effort only if (the big if) it gains in popularity.
Interesting ad for Bing here.