The Bing push

When Microsoft launched it's new search engine Bing (aka "the decision engine"), I was quite intrigued. My first reactions were on the surface. The design is clean and neat. Navigating is easy and the search results are good, although quite similar to their rival Google in my opinion.

For the last week I have been bombarded with television ads about Bing, which made me think about one thing:

What is it about Bing that is truly "better" then other search engines, mainly Google?

So I tried to answer this question, first by revisiting Bing and seeing what all of Microsoft's hype was about...mainly, what makes it a "decision engine".

The first thing I did was search Bing as if I wanted to buy an "iphone" at the best price. I searched for "iPhone" and the standard type of results came up...or did they? After scrolling down and up seeing "Apple iPhone" (apple.com) listed #1 which was no surprise, to many miscellaneous web results. Than I noticed at the top and bottom of the results next to an ebay link, a link that states "Bing cashback".

OK, now I'm curious, so I clicked. I was immediately taken to an ebay shop. There was no information about getting "cashback", so I searched Bing Shopping for "bing cashback" and received ZERO results!



I was shocked...so then I search Google for it and found in the first result: www.bing.com/cashback/
There is a page on Bing explaining "Bing cashback" that did not even come up in their own search results!"

Next I went to bing.com/cashback/ and followed the "How cashback works" link (again, not indexed by Bing???). Not to get too much into the details, but if you register, you can search, shop and save. This feature does seperate Bing from Google, and I'm sure Microsoft financially benifits through discount sales through registered users...which may explain the "Bing push".

But as far as standard search results go, when Bing can't even show it's own pages in their own search results for their own unique money saving concept, It makes me wonder what else has been overlooked.

So here is the answer to my question "What is it about Bing that is truly "better" then other search engines?"

A: It has a money saving "Bing cashback" feature...that not even Bing can recognize.