With all of the buzz about Microsoft’s latest plight in the search game, Bing, I decided I should do a little research.  Naturally where did I start?  Google.  As Google has become virtually synonymous with web search, Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle even with the troops that they have, but hopefully this will help those who are trying to make a decision a little bit.

To begin, Microsoft is claiming that Bing is supposed to help users make intelligent decisions, not simply push back results so that seemed like a good starting point for comparison.  I decided to do some parallel searches with Google and Bing to see where it got me.  My first search was “Where should I eat dinner tonight?”.  For both search engines, this was just too vague.  As a seasoned searcher, I added “in Hartford” to the search to see if that helped.  While a few restaurant guides came back in each, none were very relevant or targeted for my purpose.  For example, there were ones for “restaurants close to the Hartford Court House”.  As helpful as that may be for your repeat offenders, I try to stay in the more mainstream areas in Hartford and out of trouble.

Then genius hit me.  As someone in the network support business, I searched for “Network Support Hartford CT” to see some relevant results in today’s business world.  The results in Bing were mixed.  While 3 of the top 4 results were network support companies (including ForeSite in position #2), only 5 of the 10 results on the first page were relevant.  In Google, 8 of the 10 were related to network support though 2 were for jobs in the network support field.  While I personally believe that we should be the first result in all engines we were #3 in Google.  When you remove duplicate sites in both search engines, and the paid results in Google, the results were very similar though and it would be tough to make a decision on this alone.

Bing did have one feature that I thought was helpful which was the Document Preview feature.  When hovering a result, it tries to grab relevant text from the site and display it in a pop-up window without having to go to the site.  This was helpful to see if the displayed result was relevant without having to go to all of the different web sites listed.  This is not ground breaking, but was helpful.  Bing’s last feature that was obvious was the recent search results on the left hand side of the search page.  I’m not sure how helpful this will be over time, but I could see a few applications for it if you are looking for something you found in the recent past but can’t remember what you searched for.

So, I think this is a “no decision” unfortunately for Microsoft as they will have to come out with some real bells and whistles to de-thrown Google in the search business.

When I first started my business, I was always looking for ideas from other people about how they…well…ran their business.  In 1997 when I started ForeSite, the Internet wasn’t quite what it is today and finding templates on things like business plans, cash flow models, legal documents, proposal templates etc. were few and far between.  In comes 2009  and there is so much stuff out there, you don’t know where to start.  Go ahead, type “business plan template” into Google and see what you get (444,000 results in case you don’t want to bother).  Now Google does a pretty good job of trying to get you quality results, but some are articles, others are blogs, others are people trying to get you to click through thinking you are getting a template but you really have to buy something.  It can get pretty tiresome.

Luckily, there are new services that help filter out the good from the better.  For example,  Docjax.com is a site that will only return links to actual documents.  If you decide you only want Word documents, you can filter for only those.  Now when you start clicking through, you know that you will get back a document that you could begin to modify to suit your needs.  If you are fairly specific, you might even find exactly what you want on the first page (try: “small business farm template” for example).  You still get 1059 results, but right at the top are some pretty relevant documents.  Have some fun and download to your heart’s content.  Most of the results you’ll get will be free!