I Grok2! » bing

Microsoft Bing Search Share

grok2 — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:37:01 +0000

Seems like Bing is losing steam … “Searchers used Bing less in September than in previous months, ending three consecutive months of growth” — from InformationWeek.

Does Bing run on Windows?

grok2 — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:05:33 +0000

I wondered if Bing was run on Windows servers (that would have been an excellent demo of Windows Server). But checking on NetCraft seems to indicate that bing.com is hosted on Akamai‘s servers and Akamai probably uses Linux based hardware and software. I guess it makes sense that a company with lots of money would spend that money to not have to bother with the scalability aspect themselves . But hosting on a Windows back-end would have been a great demo.

Submitting your site to Bing

grok2 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:47:40 +0000

You can submit your site to Microsoft’s new Bing search engine here in case it isn’t already getting indexed. BTW, the search bot for the Bing search engine is named the same as the one used by MSN Search — MSNBot.

How fast does Bing index web-sites?

grok2 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:39:20 +0000

It seems like Bing’s index is not as current as Google’s possibly because Bing doesn’t crawl web-site’s as fast as Google does. My first blog post to create a Firefox addon for Bing got indexed within hours by Google and showed up in it’s search results. But it is yet to appear in Bing’s search results (it is three days now since I blogged about it).

Google’s results:

Bings results:

Bing results look like Google results

grok2 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:30:50 +0000

I was trying out the new Bing search engine from Microsoft for various searches over the last few days (for things I would normally use Google) just to get a feel for how well it performs. Like almost everyone else, I found the results were surprisingly good — comparable to results from Google. But as I was using it, I noticed that one of the reasons I found the Bing results good perhaps (now this it’s very subjective) is because they present the Bing search results in the same format as Google search –

they seem to be using the same font with the link text in blue, 2 or 3 lines of description in black and the actual URL in green below the description.
they have a link to a cached page
they highlight the searched terms in the above summary
even the sizes of the font seem to be similar

My theory is that Microsoft conspired to copy the result format to help people psychologically accept the results of being just as good as Google’s!

See a couple of screen shots below:

Compare the results from Google above with the results from Bing below.

Creating a bing search firefox addon

grok2 — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:57:04 +0000

Microsoft’s bing search just went live. Below is the XML you need to create a OpenSearch format based Firefox add-on to include bing in Firefox’s list of search engines:

 xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
>bing>
>bing search>
>UTF-8>
 width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">http://www.bing.com/favicon.ico>
 type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.bing.com/search?q={searchTerms}">>
>http://www.bing.com/>
>

Create a file with the above contents (make sure to join lines that have been split), name it bing.xml, stick it into C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins and restart Firefox — now you have bing in your search list.