Legal Research

I have to say that I began looking at Bing , Microsoft's attempt to become a search destination rather than an accidental tourist repellent ("Oh no, I'm using the MSN search function, what happened to my Google Search Bar?"), predisposed against it.  The reports of how much money Microsoft had spent developing it primed me to expect something baroque and non-utilitarian.  To a certain extent, those expectations were fulfilled. 

I did an image search for Franz Kafka (it's been that kind of week) on Bing and on Google.  At first glance, Google results and Bing results were remarkably similar, but Google found 447,000 results, while Bing returned 65,500.  Does this mean that Bing did a better job of screening out duplicate images, or that it didn't do as thorough a job of searching?  Hard to say. 



Bing's first 730 results were all on one extremely lengthy page, so lengthy, in fact, that some of the images never loaded.  Google, on the other hand, showed 18 images per page, so repeated clicking through was necessary to see the next set of images.  Google's images sit quietly on the page, Bing's swoop forward at you like the mad scientist in early 3-D movies.  The information provided is the same.  I did appreciate the Bing feature that enabled me to give them feedback on the images - I let them know that the picture of the dahlia was non-responsive. 



Bing won the numbers game in finding Franz Kafka videos.  Both engines drew heavily on YouTube, as one might expect.  The major observable difference here was that the videos on Bing don't wait for you to click on them, they start to life as you mouse over them.  Is this feature an improvement?  It is raising some fair use issues - where in many cases, Google sends you to the referring sites, saying that you can't play the video on Google, Bing merrily plays them all. 



First impression:  interesting, but not a Google-killer.