Big Brother has pegged me all wrong.
In comparing Bing, Microsoft's six-week young search again against the old great gun, Google, I searched on the two sites for the lyrics to Chuck Berry's 1970s hit My Ding-A-Ling.
Well, what do you know? The refreshing upstart that is Bing-A-Ling did not throw up a single response worth writing home about while I got the song on Google in the first attempt.
Attempts to download the lyrics on Google then saw me receiving a warning that the site contains pornography and that I had been reported to the webmaster. It is against company policy to view pornography.
Images of my boss telling me to beat it flooded my mind as a second attempt to download the lyrics yielded the same jarring response from Big Brother. Third time, lucky?
"When I was a little biddy boy/My grandma bought me a cute little toy/Two silver bells on a string/She told me it was my ding-a-ling-a-ling. My ding-a-ling/ My ding-a-ling/ Won't you play with my ding-a-ling". The more I played with my Bing-A-Ling I realised that Bing is not bad - and Google might not be so great.
Bing is consumer-driven, specialising in four key areas: making purchases, planning trips, researching a health condition and finding a local business.
Bing is designed to help people overcome search overload and make faster, more informed decisions when searching online. Microsoft claim they developed the search engine because of unhappiness with the status quo.
Google was born in 1998 giving it an 11-year start on Bing. But is it better?
Microsoft's usually rapid-responding internal and external team PR teams have not sent a word on Bing even though it was launched in the US on June 4. That I was sold its merits by Linda Kok, a passionate human resources manager, makes ones wonder why they're so silent on the communications side?
Surfing on Bing, one is greeted by a feelgood site comprising pictures of zebras or exotic locations with the searches sporting a layout that creates an aura of plenty of white space.
It looks clean and crisp, almost like the air one breathes on holiday.
Microsoft designed Bing as a decision engine to provide people with intelligent search tools to help them simplify tasks and make more informed decisions, from simple decisions such as choosing the fastest route to get home to more complex ones such as researching a product purchase or planning a trip. It helps that they are focused on key areas that interest consumers.
Given Microsoft's dominance of the world we live in and the company's dilly-dallying in more areas than it can adequately specialise in, consumers have real cause for concern.
To reinvent the wheel and be another Google does sound like a waste of time because Google is in a league of its own. What distinguishes Bing, however, is its focus on the consumer - for example, the travel site has many of the airfare and hotel tools from Microsoft's 2008 acquisition of Farecast with news and editorial from MSN Travel.
According to a recent survey by Bing Travel, 52 percent of potential travellers search three or more sites before booking their airfare.
Forty-two percent of travellers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options, and 17 percent spend more than one month.
Bing Travel aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time consumers spend searching for travel information by presenting comprehensive results in one place, and to help consumers make more informed decisions with tools such as Price Predictor and Rate Indicator. "Bing Travel has a simple goal: help people make smarter, more informed decisions regarding travel," according to Hugh Crean, general manager of Bing Travel.
"Travellers face plenty of challenges - from airport security and luggage restrictions to finding their hotel in an unknown city or trying to speak a foreign language. Researching and booking travel should be simple and easy, and Bing Travel is here to help."
Microsoft research shows that 45 percent of people use a search engine to select a flight or hotel. Bing Travel provides new, innovative travel answers within the Bing search experience. Starting today, people searching on Bing for hotels in a given city with a search such as "Vegas hotels" will get Bing Travel Instant Answers included directly in search results, featuring the Rate Indicator, which helps people choose the right hotel.
The travel weather update is also a good addition to help one pack properly when going abroad. As a specialist consumer site, Bing is a dream destination. As a fully-fledged search engine, Google is still the leader of the pack, however, while Bing does not seem to give too much information, the former does swamp one often with unnecessary material. Bing simply does not give what it thinks you don't need.
Bing isn't concerned with what is happening around the world. Google's a faster bet to digest the news.
However, Bing does come with the Microsoft baggage: one cannot escape Microsoft's Live or MSN, while Google does not seem to have such a busy blitz.
It is good to explore new search engines, such as Bing-A-Ling, but it also seems wise to hang on to Google as its 11-year-old tentacles still give it the edge over its fast-emerging rival.
Bing there, done that.
- Bing is on http://bing.com