We have come to understand that Google is a better search engine than anything Microsoft can offer. No matter how much money and publicity Microsoft throws at Bing, it’s still the results that matter and Google always comes out trumps in the results department.
However, we could be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft would have the edge in an area that it has been operating for many years longer than Google, such as with word processing.
MS Word is the industry standard for writing documents, letters, news and any form of publishing that is required. MS Word comes with its own spell checker, which some of us need more than others. Yet how many of you have tried to spell a word in MS Word, only to have a mental block and not be able to formulate the word at all?
MS Word should take over here and offer up the correct spelling, even if you’ve made a total pig’s ear of the attempt. Yet it doesn’t always. MS Word often has no answer to a badly spelt word, even though to the human eye you can see what the word is supposed to be.
Worse yet, Google knows exactly what you’re going for. If you find that a word you have written in MS Word is spelt wrong, and MS Word offers no help as to the correct spelling, Google will (as ever) have the answer.
For example, the bad attempt at the word: ‘beaurocracy’ has MS Word completely flummoxed as to what you’re trying to say. The letters are all in the wrong order, but we know when looking at this attempt that it is supposed to be ‘bureaucracy’.
Google on the other hand, knows instantly what the word was supposed to be: http://www.google.com/search?q=beaurocracy
There are of course other examples, but perhaps you could find those out for yourself.
