I'm so fed up with Google's SERP and general "whatever" attitude that I'm using Bing as my default search engine " and liking it a lot, too. Not only has it got cleaner, less spam ridden results for some searches than Google does; Firefox's top thinks it has a better, safer privacy policy too.
That doesn't mean I embrace Bing as the next Kool-Aid dispenser; I'm the first to admit Bing is (still) a work in progress and therefore among the first to admit its failures.
FAIL: minus 7C is not 44.6F
Located in Canada temperatures are expressed in Celsius for me. For my other inclined North Americans I have to translate that to Fahrenheit. In my grandmother's mother's childhood we had conversion calculators or tables for it; nowadays we have conversion built right into our favorite search engine (see: Bing).
So when Jessica D'Amico mentioned the temperature at her place, I wanted to respond with the one here. <click> <click> type in address bar: "7C in F <enter>
And what do I see?
That's -7c in f according to Bing
Here's how Google handles it correctly:
What search engine weirdness have you spotted?
I do love the Google language tool. We have so much SEO invested in Google – it’s really a worry how they change things up.
Hahahaha, hilarious. I can only imagine that once Bing can leverage all of the search technology that Yahoo has/had, that they will have a pretty darn good search engine that will definitely compete with Google.
Google had better get off of their backside and start rolling out better results. Local search is all over the place, and usually it pops up on queries that are obviously not a local type query. When I type “pizza” into Google I want to see local results, duh! And when I type “power outage in Carlsbad Ca” I want to see real time results.
.-= SEO Consultant recently posted: Brand Reputation Management =-.
I would hope you won’t judge a search engine just for parallelized service it can offers.
.-= Andrea Moro recently posted: Ossessionato dalla velocita’ =-.
I like using ChaCha for short factual questions like this. It is funny that Bing didn’t do some quality checks on this, though.
.-= Douglas Karr recently posted: Are You an Elephant or a Butterfly? =-.
Well, that’s the thing; why should it worry us when we can use something else? I’ve been at Yahoo for months too; didn’t have the “good feel vibe” I wanted. Nice tools though.
Andrea; no, I don’t judge all of Bing by this one error. And I “out it”, blog it, simply because, well, I work in this space and this gives me a breaking story 🙂 Had it been software I would have filed a bug report somewhere.
ChaCha: http://www.chacha.com/ Interesting suggestion, Douglas. Thanks!
Even if Bing is much better than Live.com it still has a long way to go to beat google in the general search results. But features like the flight search engine might help to beat the competition.
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