It is definitely hard to compete against a company that has become the verb of the service you are offering. Just ask Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, which has been a topic for Internet jokes when it comes to competing in the search engine realm. It has been months since I tried Bing. I just did (by mistake) and was pleasantly surprised with what I found.
There are many search engines out there, but the one feature that always kept me coming back to Google is summed up by this image:
Timeframe Date Search
The ability to do custom searches on different dates is incredibly powerful when you are trying to find the newest source of information. This is particularly useful when trying to troubleshooting – maybe finding out how someone fixed a problem a month ago is a lot more relevant than the procedure used to fix it 5 years ago.
All other search engines that I have used lacked this feature, but this morning I used Bing (admittedly, by mistake) and I found this in my search results:
Timeframe Search in Bing
I have not noticed this before and I definitely welcome the addition. It would be nice to see a “Past Year” preset in there as well just like Google has.
This was the only deal breaker Bing had for me, but now that this feature is included, I’ll try and use it exclusively as my search engine for day-to-day searches and report in a future post.
