I’m just not comfortable with bing.

@Mike, I took the screenshots yesterday, they are proof of what I am seeing and that the features don’t exist when I use it. So it’s not old stuff.

@Vijay (I presume you are also VS), Thanks for your points. We are a UK run blog, hence comments don’t get moderated at night so there is a delay in them appearing on the website. I understand what you are saying but even some of the things you have said EG ‘enter star trek movie’ simply do not work for me. As for when you said “looking at this article objectively” I can assure you I did do my homework (all the screenshots speak for themselves as to what I experience on Bing). I do think Google is better, but based on my experience above and the fact I think their search results are better I’m going to of course. But I didn’t make up my mind and then go looking, in fact I want to do a post with 5 reasons Bing is better but am actually struggling – the only reasons I can see are the background image being pretty (wow!), and the fact every SERP doesn’t contain a wikipedia page in it.

I’ll be doing a follow-up post in the coming days anyway so watch out for that

How about also doing a comparison of five things that Bing can do that Google can’t?

I posted a comment with analysis on why the above article was flawed and the comments are now deleted. Wonder how that happened.

Oh well, if you want to be closed to the fact that Bing does indeed offer the features above (in some cases does a better job than Google), suit yourself.

Ideally blogs should trigger open discussions and debates. If your article was factually correct, why would you be afraid to do that?

Good luck!

Lets look at each of the ‘feature gaps’ raised here-

Current time: Entering ‘current time’ in Bing does give current time. In fact i entered ‘current time london’ too and it gave me the time in London.
BTW (on a lighter note), Chris if you are actually going online and seaching for ‘current time’ to figure out the current time, you’ve got serious issues dude. Look at your watch, or the clock on your computer or phone…jeez!. . Both equally good

Sports scores: Enter ‘Baseball’ on Bing and Google.
Bing gives you RESULTs and UPCOMING games!! Google gives you a wikipedia article on baseball. lol.
Enter ‘cricket’ – both engines return scores. Both equally good.

Film times and reviews: I entered ‘Star Trek movie’ in Bing and it gave me all shows in movie theaters *near* my location! It also shows me an overview and reviews. Google prompted me to enter a city to get the results (guess the 2nd time experience will be as good as Bing). Bing better?

Maps:
Enter ‘Map san francisco’ in Bing and what do you get? Oh my god! its a map. Who would have guessed it??
Let’s take it a step further. Go to Bing and enter ‘cheesecake factory’ (Assuming you have your profile is set to san francisco). You automatically get a map and nearby locations of cheesecake factory, with ratings, phone numbers and addresses. Typing ‘cheesecake factory’ in google just gives you the cheesecake factory web site.
Bing expects that someone looking for Cheesecake factory wants to actually go there! you dont even have to enter ‘map’ to indicate that!! I’m willing to bet that a large % of people searching for Cheesecake factory actually wants to go there. Bing better.

Fill in the blanks:
Searching for ‘Bob Marley died on’ in both Search engines returns Wikipedia somewhere at the top. and you see,
‘He died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami on the morning of May 11, 1981′
Both engines show the response. with Bing you can additionally preview the links to get to the right one before clicking on the article. Why didnt this appeal to you? Not sure why this is a deal breaker for you – both engines seem to give the same response. Both equally good

Looking at this article objectively, it seems like one of the following occured,
1) The author did not do his homework before putting this piece together
2) The author made up his mind that Google was better and just tried to look for reasons to support his claims. (some people call this bias )

That said, I think the world agrees that Google is definitely a great search engine – its the most preferred one today and one reason for that is that it gets the job done well. Microsoft has done a great job with Bing, and as this article shows (though it was not the author’s original intent ), Microsoft Bing meets/beats Google on quite a few features.
But users arent picking Bing yet and the reason for that is not the feature set. It is the familiarity and comfort factor. Chris obviously is more familiar with Google and tried to identify a feature set that wouldnt work on Bing (or work the way he knew it to work!). Familiarity is going to be a big hurdle for Microsoft Bing to overcome, but they’ve made a wonderful start…and I hope from a consumer’s perspective that Google gets a real run for their money.