To Bing Or Not to Bing

26 Oct To Bing Or Not to Bing

The Bing It On blogger challenge has been a fun experiment. It’s forced me to pay attention, not only to the search engine I used but also to the kinds of results I was getting, how they appeared, what choices I had and how they were presented. Here’s a simple break down of what I have found.

1. First and foremost I have enjoyed Bing visually. As a photographer (and highly visual person) I’d much rather be greeted each morning with a lovely image over just a plain white screen with some text, or an ad. Quite frankly, I can’t image anyone that wouldn’t. My only gripe is that I cannot fine any credit to the photographer (or origin)of the image. That bums me out.
2. The small squares that are placed over the image offer clever little tidbits about the image itself, the location, or interesting little facts. Great idea and quite illuminating.
3. The image search process on Google isn’t very inspiring or helpful so I found the Bing image search a great experience. It does a fantastic job of giving you the url of the original source where the image was found. And—here’s the best part—when you find an image you love and it comes from flickr, you are led directly to that Flickr page where you can very easily then find the photographer that shot the image so that you can ASK PERMISSION to link to, use or license or even pin the original image from the original source from the photographer that owns the rights. YAY!
4. I discovered the new Tag (Beta) option on Bing which, from what I can tell allows you to tag yourself in the webpages where you want to be found. It seems brilliant to me considering I have all kinds of things that come up when I “Bing myself” and it’s helpful to be able to choose the best sites that represent who I am at the moment (it’s ever changing, is it not?). I’m just not so sure I like that other people can tag me on any site they want. That seems a little off.

As for what I think might be useful for most other people, the Facebook/Bing connection. I love the idea of getting help from Facebook friends when I need it. Although I am a little hesitant of letting my silly searching be seen by others (are they? I’m afraid to try it). It would be so embarrassing if someone say that I searched for the proper spelling of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or some such word. I’m blushing just thinking about it.

All of that being said, when asked the question will I Bing or won’t I Bing, I will answer with a wholehearted, I will Bing.

What I want to know from you is, did you take the Bing It On challenge? What did you like/not like about Bing?  My friend Karen Walrond shared her thoughts at Chookooloonks. And my daughter shared her teen perspective on her blog Everything Awesome. Oh, and one last thing; have you Binged yourself? (I’ll bet you did!) What did you find.

A special thanks to Alt (and their partner in this project, Bing). I appreciate the invite to participate in this underwritten opportunity. It was pretty fun!