Published: June 25, 2009 03:16 pm      

TECH REVIEW: ON the hunt with new Web browser

While searching the Internet a couple weeks ago for an old story I wrote, I stumbled upon something that was pretty cool.

Upon typing “Paul Lane” into Google, “Paul Lane Niagara Gazette” was the fourth option among the search suggestions it gave after typing in the partial query (this paper’s affiliation with the Gazette and the fact that I used to be a beat reporter in Niagara Falls account for this).

That query yielded some 99,000 results (500 when my name was in quotes), ranging from stories posted to this paper’s Web site to various sites that posted my stories to blogs complaining about my criticisms (and even my MySpace page).

So in testing the new Bing search engine from Microsoft, I decided to use myself as one of the test searches.

Bing, launched June 3, replaces MSN Search as Microsoft’s engine of choice. Upgrades include the same search suggestion list provided by Google, a list of related searches and a “save and share” search history option.

All well and good, but can Microsoft do anything to catch up to the competition? According to figured from digital world tracker comScore, U.S. Internet users conducted 65 percent of their Web searches in May on Google, while 20.1 percent of users utilized Yahoo! and a mere 8 percent used Microsoft sites (Bing was launched after this data was compiled and is not included).

Does Bing have what it takes to close the gap? Let’s look.

• A similar search for myself on Bing yielded 88,000 results (97 with my name in quotes), with nary a blog entry to be found. The first page did yield solid entries, though, on a music review I did of a local band, as well as a Wikipedia entry on “The Simpsons” that cites me as a source (if that’s not a clue as to the lack of credibility of Wikipedia, nothing is).

One fun feature was that when I put the cursor over a link, a window opened to the right that let me read the first few paragraphs of what was on that page, as well as other links contained on that page.

By the fifth search page, I found many of the links to be repeats, something which was not present on Google. There were, however, several links to my reviews that people had posted that Google did not yield (at least in the first handful of results pages.

For its part, Yahoo! gave search suggestions of “Greater Niagara Newspapers” and “assistant features editor” (one of my many past titles) when I typed in my name. The same search that was performed above yielded 155,000 results (2,730 with my name in quotes), with none of the links on the first page having appeared on the first few pages of either of the other two search engines.

• What about municipalities? A Bing search for Lockport New York offered 1.9 million results, with the government Web site coming up first and the Union-Sun & Journal sixth; results were broken down into categories, including real estate, newspaper and town/city, which was nice. A Tonawanda New York search gave 1.1 million results similarly broken down (we should probably be concerned that “Cancer in Tonawanda New York” was the third related search on the accompanying list).

The same Lockport search on Google gave 396,000 results, with a Google Maps depiction of the city coming first. Same thing for Tonawanda NY, which offered 1.8 million results; Google’s results were not sorted, which now that I’ve sampled Bing I kind of miss.

A Tonawanda NY search on Yahoo! gave 6.9 million results, while a Lockport NY search gave 6 million results.

Of note, Bing offers related searches off to the side (in addition to sorted categories on the main page), while Yahoo! offers related searches above the first result. Google’s related searches are at the bottom, which might not be the best place for them. Bing also offers a breakout box on the left linking you to hotels, jobs, news and images about the item being searched; both Google and Yahoo! do so mainly via the ads that appear off to the right.

Bing is the most eye-appealing of the sites, with a quaint image at the top of the screen replacing the standard white background. It seems to vary based upon the subject whether it offers the most results, but Bing is definitely a step up from Microsoft’s previous efforts, and it’s worth at least a trial use by any Web searcher.

Contact Paul Laneat 693-1000, ext. 116.