Michael W

Posting #3

Topic: Technology

Title of Article: Bing fires at Google with new social search

Author: David Goldman

Publication Name: money.cnn.com

Date of Publication: 5/10/2012

Words: 245

Main Idea:

            Bing, a Microsoft run search engine, is launching a sidebar social search to get an advantage over Google. Currently, Google has a social search feature but notifications bunch up in the middle of the screen, preventing you from being productive while gaining updates. Bing has found a solution; a sidebar that gathers information relevant to your search and neatly stacks it on the side of your browser. An example of this useful tool is if you wanted to search for a restaurant in Palo Alto. If one of your social network friends have previously search something similar, it will pop up in the sidebar. Another reason Bing has the upper hand in this redesign is that Bing includes all social networking sites, while Google only includes Google+. This is a huge factor because there are 100 million users on Google+ while there is roughly 1.6074 billion total users of other main social networking sites. This will give Bing a huge advantage over Google’s sidebar innovation because analysts are questioning how many of the 100 million Google+ users are engaged and active. Google logs about 2 billion searches a day, while Bing only logs 10 million. Maybe this improvement will level the playing field and show people that Bing is a worthy search engine.

Conclusion:

           This article refreshed me on Bing and it’s new look. Whenever I don’t know something or need answers fasts, I Google it. I don’t think I’ve ever actually used Bing, but because of the new features, I might just try it out. This just goes to show that in order to be a successful search engine, you have to impress the users with never before seen features and innovations that will want them to use it. Google was one of the very first websites made in the history of the internet, so there is no doubt that it will have an extreme amount of users, rather than the ‘new born baby’ Bing. Microsoft is a big and growing with many products available so there is no doubt that it will eventually catch up with its competition.