There’s a lot in the news lately about Google Search potentially no longer being a thing in Australia. This has led to Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, suggesting Bing as an adequate alternative. But what exactly is Bing and why has it copped so much hate over the years?
Bing explained
Microsoft Bing, commonly known as Bing, is a Microsoft-owned search engine. It’s the world’s second-largest search engine but has a much smaller engagement rate than Google. In Australia, Google has 94% of the market while Bing has 3.7%.
Microsoft’s search engine has gone through a few iterations over the years, starting as MSN search in 1998. It then transitioned through Windows Live Search and Live Search before it was rebranded to Bing.
What does Bing do?
Just like Google, Bing is a search engine and does pretty much all of the same things. Bing has autosuggestions, currency conversions and result tabs for images, videos, news and shopping, amongst other common features.
On a very basic level, a search engine’s job is to bring up the most relevant results from the internet for a user’s search term. But to do this search engines use algorithms to determine which results show up at the top.
The nature of Bing’s exact search algorithm is kept under wraps and is said to be continually updating. According to its Webmaster Guidelines, Bing ranks pages based on relevance, quality, credibility, user engagement, freshness, location and page load time. Figuring out the difference really comes down to searching on multiple engines to see which results you prefer.
Bing also powers a number of other search engines, including Yahoo!, and, just like other search engines, it also keeps track of what you do online.
Many of the things Google does, Bing also does. It really comes down to personal preference over why you would use one over the other. So why then has Bing received so much hate over the years?
Bing backlash
You only have to, ironically, Google search Bing to see commonly searched phrases such as “how do I get rid of Bing?”
The reasons for this backlash are many and varied. Some don’t like Bing’s algorithm and find its search results to be of lesser quality. Others dislike Microsoft’s tactic of forcing Bing on them as the default search engine with no easy way out. Or, like the Apple vs. PC debate, some people dislike Bing simply because it isn’t Google.
After a while, it just became the default to hate on Bing, maybe without even knowing why. This stigma has stuck in the collective conscience for so long that it’s pretty hard to revert back. But Peter Parker used Bing, so maybe there’s hope for it yet.