As you probably know, I have been in Pakistan for the past twenty-something days. I fly back to the United States over the next two days, and currently have some kind of horrible stomach bug. I should be back in the states some time Monday, so look for the normal post routine starting up again towards the middle of next week.

In the ancient computer that serves as part of the Balkhis archives there is a folder. Its a folder that is opened hundreds of times over the course of a week and within it are projects too numerous to mention. Now this old workhorse of a computer is retiring from the Balkhis line up in [...]

This is part of the products, services, and website review series on Balkhis.

Every day I open Firefox and open Google to search about whatever random thing I need to know about that day. When I first heard about Bing, I didn’t even give it a second thought. I figured it would go the way of the other search engines I have tried (like Scour) that slowly faded out of my search routine. Google was my bread and butter search engine, so why the heck did I need to try another search? Television was why.

About two weeks ago I started seeing commercials for Bing. The first time the “search overload” commercials were cute, but then I started seeing the same thing seven times a day. If I hear “moms who wear jeans to match their teen’s jeans” I was going to stab the television, so to prevent premature television death I decided to try out Bing.

The first difference from Google is the colorful background that Bing has adapted. I don’t know if it is an attempt to be the ultimate anti-google, but it is kinda cool to see an image instead of the white screen that permeates my dreams. Even better, Bing’s backgrounds have these little information squares that pop up in random places when you scroll over the screen. That is not to say that they are particularly informative little squares, but it breaks up the monotony of a plain background.

Now for the actual search. Both Google and Bing offer suggestions to correct incorrect spelling, which is a plus, but there is a definite lack of cross search results on Bing. Google at least offers some image results in the web results section, but I can forgive that. Bing does have two things that I really admire, one is the related searches panel on the left side of the search results, which I am sure will give me new and interesting ways to procrastinate via search engine, and the other is the lack of ads. Now I know that Google needs to make some money too, but I am so tired of telling the web illiterate in my family that “Sponsored Links” are no better than normal links. Now I am sure that ads will come to Bing in time, but I will enjoy the lack of ads while I have it.

Image time! Google decides to take this time to remind me that lightbulb is actually two words, but Bing is surprisingly quiet. Hmmm, maybe the magic of Bing makes my spelling automatically correct? If it does I could totally dig that, but anyway onto the images. Google proudly displays its images in its little grid as does Bing. But wait a minutes, what is this? Bing’s scroll bar lets you see up to 1,000 images on one page. As someone who is prone to flip forward multiple pages only to decide on one of the first pictures I saw, the scroll bar makes things more convenient.

Who knew that there were so many light bulb videos? I certainly didn’t. This yet another place where Bing is superior to Google. As much as I love Google’s very large video on the right hand side I much prefer Bing’s grid of videos to Google’s listing. If I was looking for a detailed description of each video, then Google is my main squeeze, but for the most part Bing’s bare bones video name and images is all that I need.

Now when I do my online light bulb shopping, I am going to have to default to Google. Bing’s image and website list is decent, but Google’s bold price to the right of each listing is just too darn good. So as far for shopping (or “product search” as Google calls it) Google is the winner.

Now when I first decided to look at Bing, I didn’t think that I would find a darn thing about it that I even remotely like. Google was just too good and too easy, and I can’t resist those creative logos on holidays. But I have to say, Bing grew on me. The video search and the image search both let me see more results that Google and the related search options give me fodder for millions of pointless searches. I have to say, for the casual user, Bing would be the search engine I would endorse.

But there is a caveat. Bing isn’t for the not-so-casual user. Along with the images, videos, and web searches Google has so many other features that Bing just can’t keep up with. My Gmail, Google Scholar, Google Documents, and heck even Google Books are all things that I use each week. So until Bing can trump Google in all these things and have the recognition that Google has there is no way that it will be my ultimate choice for a search engine. Good try Bing, maybe one day you will win out overall.

Hello to all Syed Balkhi readers. I am one of the loyal readers of this blog and it has greatly influenced my blog.

My name is Satish and I am the owner of Technotip.org, a blog about blogging, SEO, WEB2.0, Traffic strategies etc. We started blogging on 18th June 2008. So its exactly 1 year for Technotip.org. We are not able to celebrate the 1st birthday due to my exams. So I thank Syed Balkhi for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts about my blog with all you guys. This opportunity is more than just celebration for me..

I started Technotip.org with the intention of sharing whatever I had learnt online for the past 2 years. I knew that blogging about blogging and monetizing that niche with Adsense wouldn’t yield much money. But my intention was just sharing. So you wouldn’t find even paid reviews on our blog.

We do interviews of successful bloggers on our blog, as we believe that learning from those who have already learn’t saves a lot of time. That’s one of the reasons why I keep reading balkhis.com .
We constantly come up with new traffic generating strategy and most of which receive a lot of traffic!, back links and thumbs up in social media sites.
Recently one of the article 60+ Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers got huge support from many “A” grade bloggers and most of them voted for it.

And all other things like conducting contests, polls etc will be periodically held on our blog. We also have a “Top 10 Commentators” list on our front page[which has the highest pagerank] to give link juice to people who participate in the conversation.

We have a lot of interesting articles on our blog. We could realize that only when we got back links from sites like labnol, quickonlinetips, techie-buzz etc!

Our aim with Technotip.org is to build a community around the blog. So we will also be starting a forum shortly, after we build a small community around our blog. We are committed to provide value to all our readers and it will be our number 1 priority.

Thanks for Syed Balkhi for providing me the opportunity to talk to you guys. All your feedback are welcomed.

I would like to see all you guys on my blog. Please make sure, you visit the blog atleast today, as its the 1st BirthDay of our blog. If you like our blog, then please make sure that you subscribe to our blog updates.

I am launching a mini giveaway to my balkhis users. This will go for the next 15 days. I will let you advertise your website, blog, or product on Balkhis as long as it is tech related and it can be helpful to Balkhis audience. Now what better way there can be to get a strong backlink and free traffic to your website.

Now comes the crucial part: I will not be writing about your product. YOU WILL.

The posts will be published as is, without any changes, so make it good. Remember images in the post helps explain alot.

One user can submit upto two products, sites, or blogs.

Now the terms are simple:

You must be a subscriber to Balkhis RSS Feeds via EMAIL

You cannot use affiliate links in this post!

When you write these posts for balkhis, you understand that these will not be reposted anywhere else on the web. If this review is posted somewhere else, then I will remove it from Balkhis. So basically I am saying is make it unique. At least make an effort.

Tip: If you have a blog, highlight some of your best articles in the post. Give Balkhis readers a reason for visiting your site.