A recent report from The Verge illustrates not everyone follows what the tech press deems a good search engine.
For example, lots of people use Bing instead of Google for their internet search needs. If this shocks you because, “Bing is trash,” keep reading.
Though I didn’t find The Verge report surprising, one recurring line that comes up is Bing works for people 95 percent of the time — but if the Microsoft-owned search engine does work well, why does it get so much hate online?
Searching for the truth
In an effort to track down a reason why everyone seems to hate Bing, I stumbled across two articles, including one from 2018 and the other from 2013 (people have hated Bing for a long time). Together they tell an interesting story regarding why Bing has been banished from the tech conscience.
The most important story is a report from 2018 where Brian Barrett wrote a feature for Wired about what it’s like to use Bing for three months straight.
His main takeaway is that “search is search is search.” This is in line with what The Verge’s report discovered — search on the internet is a thruway, and in most cases, a search engine from any major company will take you where you need to go.
However, once Barrett delves into the details, he mentions where Bing falls off the rails. His first discovery is that Google is better at finding specific news articles since he struggled to use Bing to bring up older Wired stories he was trying to reference for his work. I can confirm Bing wasn’t as good as Google when I tried similar tests with several of my MobileSyrup articles from 2022.
Another annoying Bing search-foul is while the engine sources videos from YouTube, it pushes you to watch them on MSN. This means you need to click twice and load two web pages to get to the actual YouTube page.
“Is it the best search engine around? No, probably not. But is it bad? Not really — just slightly less efficient.”
Barrett’s breaking point is recipes. Instead of taking him to the site that actually hosts the content, Bing becomes the middleman by trying to show the recipes as a card between him and his destination. The search engine has since eased up on this specific quirk, but it’s still less efficient than Google.
The other imposing negative coming out of the Wired report is that it went live in 2018. That means that one of the largest tech publications in North America published a genuine critique of Bing four years ago, and Microsoft has done little to address it.
At least when the tech press decided to (rightly) tear into Apple Maps after its disastrous launch in 2012, Apple spent the next few years working to solve the service’s problems. And even to this day, Apple Maps is still being updated and featured prominently at Apple’s live events.
This leads us to the other interesting article that I uncovered. While this source may be a little older, it looks more at the psychology of the internet mentality, rather than the actual features of the search engine.
The article from BetaNews sources a study that placed similar search result pages in front of users, including one page with Google as the headline and the other featured Bing. No matter what was on the pages or where the results were from, people selected Google since they trusted that brand more — or really hate Bing.
Let’s wrap this thing up
After tumbling down this Bing-psychology rabbit hole, it’s led me to a few conclusions.
First off, people use Bing. Is it the best search engine around? No, probably not. But is it bad? Not really — just slightly less efficient.
Therefore, if the internet tells you something is bad, maybe don’t pile on unless you actually have used that product and found it didn’t work for you. As we learned from Wired and The Verge, Bing is fine and maybe we’re all overreacting a bit.
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