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Bing offers a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, its search relevancy is actually really great, its special search features (weather, elections, etc.) and graph tools are generally better than Google's and they overall just seem to try harder on search nowadays. On the other hand, search isn't the only important thing - presumably that is why Google doesn't seem to focus there. Bing has seemingly given up on some of the big things, like Maps, and failed to promote others (like Translator) in ways that really compromise the core offering. Bing Maps used to have a very legitimate edge over Google; then they stood still for years and I'm not sure they could ever catch up. To make matters worse, Bing has lost lots of cool, useful features; features that I could show someone and then expect them to legitimately consider Bing. For example, searching for a song used to let you immediately read the lyrics without ads, listen to the song through Zune or buy the song through various providers. Wolfram Alpha used to be directly integrated into the search engine; it was extremely powerful and convenient. I really would have liked to see a Bing that didn't take as many steps back as it took forward; that Bing could be a real contender. |
As far as I'm aware Bing (along with Facebook and Yahoo!) are backing https://wego.here.com/ these days. I'm curious to see where that goes...