Would anyone else like to Bing it on?

To Bing or not to Bing?

I began teaching from my own Scheme of Work on Friday 21 Nov.  I was asked by a student, during a class discussion and slide show on Impressionism, about further work by Van Gogh.  I had no extra slides on Van Gogh prepared so I 'Googled' him.  In fact as Pembrokeshire College computers do not use Google I actually I 'Bing'd' him.  

I always use Google at home and was happy surprised to find Bing superior to Google.  Superior in that the images were all relevant and there is an option to play images as a slide show, whilst keeping an eye on the images due to come up in the order of slides at the bottom.

Bing is owned by Microsoft and is a major competitor with Google and was launched in 2009.  In Bing's bid to become the main competitor of Google it announced in 2011 it would power Yahoo's organic results.

I had no idea that Bing had quietly been evolving but as Bing's Corporate Vice President, Mike Nichols says: "We continued testing our results [...] Bing was regularly beating Google in web search results quality. [...] It's time to break the Google habit – you deserve more from your search engine."(Nichols, 2012)

Well, needless to say I do deserve more from my search engine, so I rushed to "Bing it on"

This screenshot above shows the results of my bing vs Google test.  Not entirely conclusive but there you go!  I may yet break the Google habit, time will tell. 

References

Nichols, Mike (2012) ‘Take the Bing It On Challenge!’. Available at: http://blogs.bing.com/search/2012/09/06/take-the-bing-it-on-challenge/ [Accessed: 12th November 2014]

Bibliography

Altoft, P, (2014) ‘Yahoo Organic results powered by Bing from 3^rd August in UK’. Available at: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/yahoo-organic-results-powered-by-bing-from-3rd-august-in-uk/ [Accessed: 12th November 2014]
Bing, (2014) ‘Bing it on’, Available at: http://www.bingiton.com [Accessed: 12th Novmber 2014]
Ward-Bailey, J. (2014) ‘Search engine wars: Microsoft invite Google to “Bing it on”’. Available at: http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0907/Search-engine-wars-Microsoft-invites-Google-to-Bing-It-On. [Accessed: 12th November 2014]
Bing (2014) Available at: http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Post%20Impressionism%20Van%20Gogh [Accessed: 12th November 2014]