June 04, 2009
Popular queries
Bing: Can a "Popular" Search Engine Become Popular? , Traffick.com (June 3)
Tip for getting answers at Bing - don't add qualifiers.
Andrew Goodman tells this story about getting stats on Roy Halladay, pitcher for the Blue Jays.
"Type 'Roy Halladay shutouts single game' or whatnot." (We search experts try not to give more precise directions. It makes normal people feel uncomfortable.)
I've seen many demos (by Microsoft, even). But rarely do I do just like the people in Microsoft focus groups did: notice a difference with the engine's usability, and recommend it to someone.
We didn't find the stat quickly.
Then I remembered that the Bing engine has been tuned to offer more orchestrated consumer-friendly results pages when you type in "Roy Halladay" without any qualifiers.
Sure enough, Carolyn saw a pretty useful Roy Halladay search result full of photos, stats, and search refinements... just one notch short of a Roy Halladay shrine."
To give credit where due though, that one big page of stats was from Yahoo Sports.
How well do other search engines do on this kind of popular query about a sports person.
Ask.com is supposed to be strong on sports. For Roy Halliday - we get a smart answer with profile, photo, news, video, questions, statistics - bonanza.
Yahoo.ca shows photo and stats from Yahoo Sports and an enhanced Wikipedia entry.
Google.ca compared to the others has the answers - with news first, followed by Wikipedia and Yahoo - but is very plain.
Ask and Yahoo seem to me much more attractive and informative than the plain text display of Bing and Google. Sorry Bing - struck out on this one. I did check other names. Bing is more competitive with Yahoo for information on singer Celine Dion and golfer Tiger Woods. Ask holds its own on both. In all cases though, we do quite well just entering the name - don't even need quotation marks.
Posted by Gwen at June 4, 2009 12:55 PM