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Monday, June 1, 2009

Is there a Bing in your genealogical future?

Microsoft is trying to play catch-up with Google and has introduced a new search engine/portal Website called "Bing" as is Crosby I guess. cnet news. Actually, the search engine is revamped from its existing site, formerly known as "MSN." But MSN is still online. Perhaps we can excuse the new site for being new, but a search for "Genealogy's Star" did not return anything at all until I put the name in quotes, then I got 33 results. The same search, with the name in quotes, on Google brought up 606 results. That seems like a significant difference. Making the same search in Ask.com for example, brought up 178 hits.

I never did care for MSN because of all the junk that came up with the search. Although you could customize the interface, you had to start with a lot of things you were not interested in at all. The new Bing is still a lot more than the simple Google Classic startup screen.

Here are a couple of more search results and the comparison with Google.

genealogy
Bing 38,700,000 Google 99,700,000

familysearch
Bing 1,140,000,000 Google 2,540,000

Looks like the figures are all over the board. Actually, when I began looking at the hits for "familysearch" some of the returned items were not relevant at all after one or two pages.

I guess I will check back from time to time, but as for now, I still like Google better.

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