Bing Searches for Continuous Development
February 5, 2016
I read “Microsoft Shifts Bing Search Engine To ‘Continuous’ Development Cycle.” Frankly I had never considered the frequency of Bing updates. I do pay attention when Microsoft relies on Baidu or Yandex for search. I may or may not notice when Bing “hides” its shopping service. I have given up trying to locate Microsoft academic search and trying to figure out how to eliminate pop culture references from a Bing results set. In short, I know about Bing, but I don’t think about Bing unless I read articles like “Bing Search for Android Gets New Design and Lots of Bugs in Latest Update.”
Recently Bing realized that it was not making modifications to the site quickly enough. I learned:
The Bing team has openly stated that it was finding its deployment cycle was limiting innovation.
The idea is that Bing will just get better more quickly. Okay, that sounds good. I learned also:
Some people call this learning to fail fast i.e. get features tested and only keep the stuff that works.
I took another look at the write up. The author is a “contributor” to Forbes. Does this mean that the write up is an advertorial? That’s okay, but the conclusion left me scratching my head:
Quite why Bing isn’t the new Google is another topic altogether. Microsoft may never challenge the search giant’s simplicity, functionality and query intelligence – or it might, we don’t know. What we do know is that software updates have to work a whole lot faster than they used to and only the successful ‘code shops’ will now follow this pattern.
My thoughts on why Bing lags behind Google boils down to:
- The Bing index strikes me as less robust than Google’s
- The Bing system does not deliver results that give me access to content on sites which are smaller and often quite difficult via the Bing tools.
Google is not perfect, so I rely on Ixquick.com, Yandex, Unbubble.eu and other systems. Bing is not a second choice for me. Speed of code changes is, like many of my Bing search query results, irrelevant.
Stephen E Arnold, February 5, 2016
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