25 Jan

the day the google died

In 1998, I relied on two search engines, Alta Vista and Yahoo, each of which was radically different in how they worked. Alta Vista required understanding boolean logic and was very geeky, but if you knew what you were doing, it could produce amazing results. Yahoo categorized content very effectively, so in cases where Alta Vista failed because of search terms having multiple meanings, Yahoo would come through.

Then Google came onto the scene and when it opened up at google.stanford.edu, I was an instant convert and never looked back. I remember when I would see my co-workers at Apple struggle to search for something on the Internet and I’d evangelize Google to them. Many people were very resistant! I got into the habit of just politely taking over people’s keyboards at their desk and re-doing the search they were trying to do in Google. I probably converted at least one person a day that way as they were amazed at the results as I was.

Google has slowly forgotten what made it great in the first place. In the past few years, I noticed a gradual decline in search result quality that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. As the number of times Google search failed me increased, I’ve started trying other search engines like Yahoo and Bing. I’ve found that Bing especially seems to provide results that are at least as good, if not better than what Google does, while having some unique qualities that make it worth giving a try:

  1. With the advent of Google+ you can no longer do searches on Google that MUST contain a specific search term. Previously, you could prefix a word with a “+” and it would find only pages that contain that term. Bing still supports this, and in addition, you can do advanced searches that include all search terms. 
  2. Bing’s interface is more polished and less cluttered than Google. One of the things that originally made Google great was its spartan, clean interface. Now, it’s all junked up and it takes away from the search results.
  3. One really nice feature that I appreciate on Bing is when you do a search, it dynamically changes the available tabs (Images, Shopping, Videos, News, Maps, etc) based on the results. This lets you know if it’s worth clicking on any of the tabs, which is a great time-saver.
  4. Bing has a great Advanced search feature that is quite powerful. Most people will never use it, but if you understand it, it’s far better than what Google has. 

About two weeks ago, I changed my default search in Safari and on my iPad and iPhone to Bing and have so far not looked back. Bing seems to have successfully ripped off many of the cool things that Google originated while not forgetting that the most important thing is the quality of the results.

I’m no fan of Microsoft, but sometimes being an underdog makes you remember that user experience trumps everything else.