From the days of altavista.com to google to bing.com, the search engines are evolving. I still remember the days in 1999 when I was a faculty in a web designing institute. I used to refer altavista.com to my students in every possible manner I could during my lectures. Every single computer in our office had altavista.com as their default website in the browser settings.

Then came google.com which I discovered in 2000 and instantly became crazy of due to its simplistic nature and results. The queries displayed were measured in milliseconds and the results were simply fantastic. It was damn easy to rank for keywords we desired with a bit of on site SEO in Google SERP. For me, Google promoted easy ranking and earning in thousands of dollars with lakhs of pages optimized and ranked on top. Everyone started praising the rising sun and we affiliate marketers made a killing out of the search engine results.

As years passed (2002-2004), Google danced and algorithms became stricter. The same keywords we used to rank for tanked and our results were to be nowhere found. The search engine we promoted with every breath became our biggest enemy. I’ve had instantly lost all my monthly earning to zero and seeing my dozens of websites banned. For the newbie’s, I’ve never promoted porn, medicines, pokers, gambling and any illegal products on my website.

I’ve just helped the US shoppers choose their appropriate products. Suddenly, dozens of my employees became jobless due to Google’s abnormal nature of penalizing the websites. Tired of the SEO game, I had to resort to various other business ventures which are successful till today though I still cannot forget those days when a search engine can make and break a successful business. Google ended one area of SEO promotion and gave way to various methods like white, grey and black hat. I could go on and on with Google motto “Don’t be evil”. I’ll save my entire energy on a comprehensive post for future.

Fast forward 2009, Bing.com publicly releases its search engine and I am not surprised to see it on par with google.com if not better.

Some of the features in bing.com are (courtesy of axandra.com)

How is Bing different from Google?

Bing is not dramatically different from Google, but some people have found its results stronger. There are some visible changes:

• Bing shows a preview of the web pages in the search results when you hover your mouse pointer at the right side of the search results.

• Bing displays fewer results if it is certain that it has understood your intent. The search for “Facebook”, for example, brings up just one result linking to the site itself.

• Some search results are divided into categories. For example, if you search for the popular musician “Justin Timberlake”, you’ll get results in the categories news, songs, movies, biography, wallpaper and downloads. In addition, the search results show images, videos and the popularity of the musician.

• Wikipedia searches can be displayed inline in the search results without leaving the Bing site by clicking the “Enhanced view” link.

• Bing features a different background image every day. The image contains special hidden hotspots that lead you to more information (soon advertising?) about the image.

• Despite the background image, Bing’s homepage loads very quickly in your web browser because the search box and logo load first. You can turn off the background image.

• Bing’s video search lets you watch videos without leaving the search engine.

• Bing offers specific health, shopping and travel search engines, as well as instant answers to travel searches. For instance, the search “Vegas hotels” displays a selection of hotels in Las Vegas, including hotel stars and prices.

• Bing’s search history lets you return to your most recent searches of the last two days. This feature can be turned off to protect your privacy.

• Some of Google’s features are missing, for example, Bing doesn’t seem to recognize misspellings and returns no results in these cases.

I need a change for sure. I am sick of the dominating Search engine called google.com. This is my personal view and nobody can change that. Sue me, fry me, kill me but I need a change. Bing.com is breathing of fresh air. How fresh it would be, god knows. But for sure, I will praise the rising sun.

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