Bing, Microsoft's johnny-come-lately of search engines, just earned major points in my book. Their ads are catchy--and omnipresent--but I never understood how they could possibly compete in a market dominated, even saturated, by Google and Yahoo!.
Until tonight, that is. It was recently announced that the new iPhone will carry Bing, in addition to Google, as a search option. I guess that's good news for them, but what really caught my attention was not what's carrying Bing, but what Bing is carrying. That's right: Bing is now indexing Nifty Rictus.
For those even less knowledgeable about these things than I am, that means that a search for "nifty rictus" on Bing turns up this blog, while a search on Google or Yahoo! turns up "0 results" or results limited to pages (like my web site, or my old blog) that link to this one. One of the fastest ways to appear in the search results on a search engine, of course, is to submit your site for indexing. Given my skepticism about Bing, I submitted "http://niftyrictus.blogspot.com" to Google a few weeks ago, then to Yahoo! about a week ago, and finally to Bing a day or two after that. Not only was submitting to Bing far easier than submitting to, say, Yahoo! (which forces you to open an account with them to submit a site), but its turnaround was the fastest--which surprised me, since this blog is hosted by a Google subsidiary.
So thanks, Bing...and I apologize about my lack of faith in you. I was already using your ads as reference points to help explain why certain people are bad conversationalists and bad classroom participants. (I swear I had a class with a version of the search overload guy in it--see below.) Now I see that your strength isn't just advertising. I think you've made the right decision, boosting my little blog when all the big search engines just smirked. I'll try not to let you down.
