Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” which replaces Live Search, promises to be a decision engine rather than a search engine. Cominvent has tried it.
The front page of “Bing” is nice looking. I’m in Alexandria, and want to decide how to get from Alexandria to Hurghada, so I type “how to get from alexandria to hurghada”. The result set is a non-impressive boring listing of results, with exactly the same look & feel as Google results, not very innovative.

Let’s compare:

From a decision engine I’d expect to get an overview of possible travel options, such as Air, Bus, Train. This however is just the normal bla-bla. Let’s try the same on Google:

At least the top two results on Google are about flights between the two cities, which is better.

Let’s try to get decision help in purchasing an iPhone. From some more searching, it seems as if it is unfair to do the comparison on the Norwegian version of Bing, as it does not contain ads or related searches, so let’s go for the English. Search is “buy iPhone”:

That’s a bit better:

Here, both Bing and Google at least show both relevant ads and iPhone links. But decision engine????

The shopping support does not show up until I try to find it, searching for “casio exilim” – the first link is “Shop for Casio Exilim”, and clicking that takes me to a nice result set with photos of the models, reviews and price. Not very impressive, as Google has had this with Froogle for many years.

Bing seems not to be the revolusion Microsoft promised, so time will show if it becomes a hit or not.