I joined Twitter around a week ago. Although I was in strong belief that Twitter was a wastage of time  but still after reading several reports from internet marketers I wa convinced to join it (kind of). So I went on, added my picture, biography, website link.

I found it hard to tweet at first and I still do. Usually, I don’t have something very special going that I’d want to tweet about. So, I decided to go on the hunt to get some good followers. I followed around 300 people and got 230 people following me back which is not bad at all.

After this comes the important part. Was Twitter useful? The only important post that came in between was the last one about Bing. It got tweeted by me and Re-tweeted by two other people. Overall, I got around 50 visitors from Twitter thanks to that. So, this means that Twitter is in fact a great tool.

I was thinking of doing this post a while ago but just forgot about it because I know that many of my blogs readers would be Twitter-ers. So if you use Twitter, you can check my twitter page and follow me and I’ll follow you back. Soon I’ll put up a link to Twitter on the header of this blog. How were your results with Twitter?

With all the negative reviews coming everywhere about Bing, I thought of doing a positive one. I mean, give the new search engine a chance. Despite the fact that bing.com currently has a compete rank of 818,472 which is even lower than mine but that search engine just launched on 28th May. There are two vivid reasons for people not liking Bing.

Firstly, they still have live search in mind so they think that Bing is no different. Secondly, people have forgotten about searching, they’re too busy googling. So when a new search engine takes on searching, they can’t accept to search when they’re having so much fun googling.

I use Google pretty much every day. Around 40-50 times on an average but that doesn’t mean that I get too accustomed to Google and wouldn’t even have the courtesy to try another search engine. Might sound lame to loyal Google supporters but the following are five reasons why you should give Bing a chance.

#1 - Bing Saves A Lot Of Time

This screen shot became popular on Digg somewhere around 3 days ago. Although the picture speaks for itself, I’ll just say that you don’t see this on Google normally. This is an extreme plus point for Bing users.

#2 - Bing Knows How To Answer Questions

Just because of the small new feature of Bing of being able to display extra information really gives them an upper hand. They really did work on their algorithm which now produces great results if you type in questions. After looking at these pictures below you might say: “Use the define syntax instead”. For your information, the define tag works on both but more than 95% of Google users wouldn’t even know what a define tag is.

#3 - Bing Doesn’t Rely On 10 Year Old Designs

I started using the internet back in 1999. Ever since, I’ve seen Google with the exact same design. They may have added new features every now and then but they have the same faded design. Although I didn’t like their design at first and said “If you ever start a search engine try not to display your knowledge of renewable energy resources like windmills and solar panels“.

I had to change my opinion because that’s dynamic and it changes every day (so far). Moreover, if you hover over the image, at different positions there are some facts that you might want to know. It’s helpful, you can learn a few things everyday. This might be in counter to Google Doodles but I find this one much more useful. After all, this is Web 2.0. you have to keep up.

I’m not saying that Google’s interface is not good, in fact they have one of the most user-friendly interfaces on the web right now because of the simplicity of the design. But some things have to change. Like, when was the last time you used the ‘I’m feeling Lucky!’ button?

#4 - You Don’t Have To Go To Bing ‘Hot Trends’

If you’re an internet marketer, you must be aware of Google hot trends. It basically shows you what’s hot on the web right now or on a more marketer’s approach: It shows you which keywords are being searched the most right now. However, following the idea from Twitter, Bing also shows what’s popular or in other words: Which keywords are being searched the most. Unlike Google, Bing makes it more easy to see what’s popular and more people get to see what’s going on.

#5 - Bing Allows Feedback

“So, Google supporter. When was the last time you got help from google when you needed it?”. Whether that be a search problem, requesting a new feature or whatever, you need to have a feedback form. If you tell me: “Google has so many users, they can’t afford to have a support team answering thousands of mails a day”, I’ll say: “The former number 1 company in the U.S. and the current number 4 company in the U.S. can’t afford to have a feedback form and support staff with that? They have billions in profits every year, squeezing out a million for support will not hurt a bit.”.

Leave that, Google doesn’t even provide a proper contact form for users of Blogger and Orkut. Remember when they disabled my blogger account, and unfortunately I couldn’t even contact them. But wait. I forgot, you actually can contact Google. Why don’t you send them a fax at +1 650-253-0001? Pretty user friendly right?

Now let’s switch the whole scenario to Bing. Even though they don’t have other services yet, they’re providing a feedback form to any user. Moreover, it is at the front page. I found it hard to believe and got to them with a stupid question. I check after 30 minutes and I have a reply. A useful reply to what I was asking by the Bing support team. Can you challenge this?

Hope that helps change the image of Bing in your mind a little bit and you might give it a try. Take a tour of Bing and I’m sure you’ll find it useful to some extent. In fact, it is already catching fire, stat counter shows that it took a jump ahead Yahoo! in the market share and that was because of a decrease in the market share of Google! By the way, I might have sounded biased on Bing’s side but this was not a sponsored review!

In case you still don’t know what Bing is, Bing is a new search engine introduced by MSN. If you read my last post about live search then you’ll probably know how I started thinking of windows live search as useless. However, the buzz about Bing started building about a week ago.

Prior to this, a coming soon page was displayed. But yesterday, they released it’s ‘preview’ version. No comments about how it’s working because I’m still not going to use it anyways, although I did give it a few tries. They have kind of jacked up their algorithms and their search is better than before.

But thinking from a marketer’s point-of-view, then here are the facts:

• Live search sent me a maximum of 5 hits per month.
• The search terms were so stupid that made me wish that my website never existed.
• The bounce rate never got below 90%!
• Bing sent me 12 hits on the first day of it’s release.
• The hits were from popular keywords hence giving me useful and targeted visitors.
• The bounce rate is 10%!!

The hits I got from Bing can then again be seen from two perspectives.

1. It’s probably the first day so it did not send me as much hits as it will send me in the future.
2. The buzz is all about Bing. Everybody’s using Bing and there is extra-ordinary buzz about it. Once people realize that it sucks, they might never use it again. Hence, the traffic goes down!

As for the launch, my stats tell me that it is going great :-P. However, the new found success of windows will only be proved once we see a consistent flow of traffic (assuming that we do optimize for bing in the future). My current rating of Bing would be ‘not bad’ from the eye of a search engine user. Although I have no idea why they have windmills on the main page.

Tip: If you ever start a search engine try not to display your knowledge of renewable energy resources like windmills and solar panels. This is a very serious advice.