The blogosphere has been ablaze with talk of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Personally, I liked the search engine and the results it threw up. I believe that the only reason your website analytics data shows you so many referrals from Google is because so many people are using the search engine!

Over time, we have tailored our online searching habits to enter ‘keywords’ and other related data when we want to find something. Therefore a search for the ‘best chicken dish in the Bandra area of Mumbai’ normally ends up looking like this:

The problem with this result is that it doesn’t tell me which is the best place to go to have chicken in Bandra. The approach is more like throwing the Yellow Pages at me!

Semantic search, on the other hand, was touted as the next best thing to sliced cheese and was said to include Natural Language Processing capabilities. There are currently a few search engines built on this technology and I wanted to see where they have reached so far, so I entered a natural query with a spelling mistake to find out where some of them had reached.

Thoroughly disappointing to say the least. However, there were one engine that did come close to what I was looking for:

As you can see, Lexxe recognised I was searching for ‘chicken’ and brought up reviews from MouthShut and Burrp – arguably two of India’s largest user generated product review websites.

Coming back to the point, how does Bing fare in the collective soup of search engines?

Not bad at all, I must admit. However, this is still like throwing the phonebook at me.

Edit: Manan commented in the comments below that I should change the country geography to US and try it again, so here:

This result is better than the earlier but not yet the most optimal, in my humble opinion.

What I would like instead? Search results that show me user reviews from Indian product review websites, ranked on the basis of their popularity. Now that would be one result me and my tummy would have some confidence in!

Much love,
– Asfaq