Bing vs. Google - There's another to consider

Yesterday Yahoo and Microsoft finally announced their search partnership. If you haven’t kept up on how Google is changing the shape of their competition, Yahoo decided to get out of the search business and have agreed to outsource their search service to Microsoft. This comes at a great time for Microsoft as they finally have what should be considered a viable search alternative in Bing. If you haven’t yet checked out Bing you should just for the user experience. Bing provides an option when you roll your cursor over the search results to view the content on the link without actually clicking on the link. With that said they’ve had some significant indexing issues and you won’t find exactly the same kind of results that you will in Google. Microsoft claims that they have indexed the most significant results but good indexing takes time so if you’re looking for some a bit more obscure you may be disappointed. (On a side note I have been frustrated over the lack of indexing my personal consulting site www.baer-consulting.net. While it showed up in Google the day after I went live, it still, two weeks later, has yet to show up on Bing.)

Following the ultimate implementation of Bing on Yahoo -- this deal should take a good six months to roll out -- consumers will have to choose between Google and Bing. The only remaining alternatives are a collection of third tier players including ask.com among others. (Remember askjeeves?) But actually there is another alternative: WolframAlpha. Have you checked that engine out? If not, you absolutely should! (www.wolframalpha.com) For a subset of search needs WolframAlpha clearly exceeds anything offered by Google or Bing. Are you looking for the answer to a mathematics equation? Chemical formula or historical information on a date? You need to check out WolframAlpha! Not only does this site approach search in a different way, its results are far superior for its focused type of searches over any rival.

It’s been so de rigueur to type your own name into Google to see how high you may rank in their search results -- come on, you know you’ve done it! With WolframAlpha, it’s way too much fun to type in your own birth date or hometown! Check it out. If you’re as geeky as me you’ll bookmark it immediately!