The New York Times is apparently in love with Microsoft’s new search engine. They have a review of Bing that touts it as better than Google… but I don’t get it. I’ve tried Bing a few times and as far as I can tell, it seems like just a Google clone with flashier background images. The search results certainly aren’t any better, in my experience, and the features that the NYT seems so trippy over aren’t actually that much to get excited about.

For instance, displaying the first few paragraphs of each result in a popup box. As I recall, showing the initial paragraphs of the result page was one of the things Google dumped — Google was among the first to highlight the context of your search terms back in the old days when everybody else just displayed the first paragraphs of the page. Showing them in a popup box doesn’t make them any more useful, although to be fair it doesn’t really hurt.

The new panel to the left of the search results is kind of nifty, but it’s really just a list of related searches. Google has been offering related searches for quite a while.

Travel is reportedly one of Bing’s strengths, so one of the first things I tried it for was booking an airline ticket to Chicago. Bing does offer a quick summary of fares from several major cities (one of which might be relevant for any individual searcher) at the top of its search results, along with a link to their actual flight search engine, which is pretty good and is something that Google doesn’t have. Still, I rarely fly, so the flight search isn’t much use to me, and I feel like someone who does fly frequently would know the better specialty search engines. (Google did lead me to one of those, http://www.kayak.com, which has a fantastic interface that Bing seems to have halfheartedly ripped off)

So in summary, I don’t know what’s up the the NYT article but I can’t agree there. Bing is not bad, but it’s no Google-killer and I will certainly be leaving my default search engine as is for the foreseeable future.