Slashdot Mirror
Google vs. Bing — a Quasi-Empirical Study
eko3 writes "SearchEngineLand.com is featuring an article that compares Google's result query relevance performance to Microsoft's Bing. Through the author's methodology and very small sampling, he argues Bing returns slightly more relevant results than Google. The article suggests that Google is riding its current market success based on its legacy namesake when internet search used to be a lot more painful than it is today."
Through the author's methodology and very small sampling,
Science Fault Detected! Engaging TL;DR.
As I sit here surfing the web on my Digital Equipment Corp. VAX 4000, I wonder... why is there no comparisons to AltaVista... the king of search engines.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Google's primary business function is 'search', though they've attempted to diversify with documents and the like.
Microsoft's primary business function is documents and the like, though they've attempted to diversify with search.
There's a very low barrier to individual users to choose between them for either (given that MS has put its document processing online for free, last I heard) so, in the end, it's likely that the superior product (whether marketed better or actually better) will triumph in marketshare.
Bring this back up in 18 months, and we'll likely see some clear differential if there really is an actual difference in the applicability of either one's functions.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
How long before either search engines will find my post and add it to their indexes?
A single person's subjective analysis of 20 search terms is a small sample indeed! I will say, Bing has come a long way in producing search results I feel are useful, but I still find myself frequently forgetting Bing is the default search, coming up with bizarrely useless results, switching to Google, and saying to myself, ah yes, these are the results I was expecting.
Perhaps I've just learned to produce search results in Google that meet my needs and haven't developed that skill in Bing. A more thorough, less subjective analysis comparing the two search engines would be very interesting. Sadly, I think this writer's personal conclusion is just going to spark a nerd-war over Google vs. Microsoft filled with subjective opinion (like mine) and little empircal evidence.
Anyone care to try to replicate the results? You could probably just use his list, or create a list of your own if you really want to. I'd do it myself but I'm supposed to be working.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
I agree with the notion that Google is riding it's legacy of taking search from something that was literally an impossible problem to solve to something that was instant. It earned every bit of that, but search has entered a new era.
Bing is now competing at the forefront, which is taking search from finding results in an index to finding answers to questions and solving problems. "Decision engine" is a bit overhyped, but it's the right direction to move in, in my opinion. This is a good thing, because Bing and Google will push each other.
I generally refer friends and people I know to Bing because they tend to treat search engines like a natural language processor, or as a companion that can help them answer questions and solve problems.
Google is still (much) more effective if your Google-fu is powerful, but if it's not, Bing can be a bit friendlier and better at getting you to what you want to see.
Unfortunately, Google as reached "Default" status, and is thus the standard search engine used, not just from its own website, but also in search bars, phones, and other integrated instances. Marketing might make Bing more visible, but its Google's unseen market share that is the real challenge.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
But I still don't know how to change the water filter on a Frigidaire Professional Series.
For some reason, they gave Bing 7 points for that query.
But the first result merely regurgitates the question, then has an ad link for Fixya.com.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Sorry, can't resist:
"I am the machine that makes bing."
Do your own thing. And overdo it!
Google just returns too many garbage marketing links. Bing isn't vastly better, just slightly. And, I imagine that if people start to migrate, they'll take on the same ad ratios as Google.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
After trying to put up with Bing (being the annoying default in IE 7/8, and on my smartphone) it just doesn't hit the right notes with the kinds of searching I do. It's probably that it doesn't prioritize Wikipedia results high enough, though.
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. sure, maybe he's right. but bing is still a pain in the a**e when it comes to user friendliness. search results are important, but not everything.
20 searches, 15% margin, 100% subjective.
It doesn't matter, google won.
Generally speaking, to dethrone the entrenched standard (in any industry, not just search engines) you have to be substantially better to get people to switch to something they aren't used to. Marginally better just won't cut it. Cost is a moot point, because outside of MS paying me a check every month to use bing, you can't beat the price of free.
Humans are generally animals of habit, and unless you give them a good reason to, they won't change.
For about the first half of 2008, Yahoo search was better than Google search.
Yahoo introduced specialized subengines - stocks, weather, movies, celebrities - which were triggered by matching queries. Each subengine had a special case for that class of information. Yahoo had about fifty such subengines.
Nobody noticed. Yahoo's market share didn't move. I only knew about this because I went to a talk by the head of Yahoo R&D at the time.
Bing's strategy seems to be mostly to follow Google. Google put Google Places into web search (a big mistake, because Places is so easy to spam), and Bing followed within days.
This week, everybody from Techdirt to CNN is dumping on Google for their spam problem. Even Paul Krugman at the New York Times mentioned it. There's much blog talk of "human powered search" or "curated search" to stop the spam but the failure of Wikia Search, and the lack of interest in ChaCha, Swicki, and Rollyo, indicates that's a dead end. (Mahalo started as human-powered search and ended up as a content farm, which is a hint that "human powered" doesn't equate to "better". No complaints from search users about that, though.)
(Note: I have a position in this; I run SiteTruth. There, we try to find the business behind the web site, and rate that, using data from the SEC, BBB, D&B, and other hard data sources about businesses. This works well at eliminating spam. Too well for some sites; we get complaints about our hard-ass "when in doubt, rate it down" approach.)
I use about six languages on a daily basis and IMHO bing sucks at everything that isn't English.
I'm part of a small minority of users that avoids MS products at all costs, even if they have better products. I wonder what percentage of techies are like that?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I get strange looks when I tell someone I Binged myself.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
One avenue companies utilize in trying to get you to use their products and services is through TV advertisements. While I have seldom been swayed to use products or services because of a TV ad, I often go out of my way to NOT use products or services from advertisers with either annoying ads or ads which go out of their way to insult the viewers' intelligence. Given Bing's current 'search overload' annoyvertisement (yeah, I'm coining a new word here), and regardless of Bing's competence in producing useful search results, I'll use the more-than-adequate Google search results which are easily customized using a few easy to remember search operators (http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html).
Microsoft is just downright "evil" in the terms used by, well lots of people. They are anti-competitive, non-free, anti-open-source, and every other kind of non-good they can get away with.
Google says they are not evil, so that must be true. They do help authoritarian regimes repress their people and they are collecting vast treasure troves of data on us with fantastic cross-correlations (i.e., they can match your searches to your group memberships to your map use to your e-mails to your documents to your photos and so on and so on). But again, they say they are not evil, so they are downright friggin' saints.
Wondering if this will get modded flamebait, troll, or insightful. All wrong. Try again.
It has been my experience that as Google has gotten bigger they seem to return at the top of their results pages that are nothing more than aggregating websites (most contain LOTS of google adverts too, which piques my thoughts on why they do show up at the very top of Googles searches). This is VERY annoying. As a result, I, previously a great supporter and user of Google, have been looking for a search engine that doesn't return websites that do nothing but hand me links to other websites. If i find one, that loads quickly, I will dump Google.
If Google is listening, it should be very easy to stop the aggrigation websites (sites that have NO CONTENT but just contain links to other sites) from reaching the top of your results.
I would never structure my searches the way this guy did in his study. For example if you want google to look for Attorney Tom Brady then put quotes around it.
You'll note that the story says "Sponsored by In-House SEO Exchange@SMX West". A quick visit to that site shows that Bing is a Premier sponsor of SMX West.
Of course Bing! is better than Google. Shenanigans! Or at the very least, suspect.
Microsoft is notorious for working hard until they get it right and then steadily eating into their competition. They've practically torn Sony limb-from-limb in the video game market, something which would have been unthinkable in the early millennium when Sony was an unstoppable juggernaut that was able to destroy Sega just on "sheer perceived awesomeness" alone. From the initial reports about Windows 8, it sounds like they've fully grasped the OS X/iOS lesson and are moving toward a similar unified Windows product base.
It's really amusing to me whenever I see people dismiss Microsoft as a dinosaur that is thrashing in a tar pit. They act like its collapse is "inevitable" like Microsoft is some sort of corporate Soviet Union. In the late 90s/early millennium, everyone was saying that Linux or this or that would kill them. Guess what? Windows 7 probably put the nail in the coffin for desktop Linux among mainstream users in the US and much of Europe.
People mistake the fact that the market is competitive with Microsoft dying. It's more realistic to say that Microsoft is being forced to adapt and compete. If Windows 7 is their first real volley in that respect, I'd be cautious if I were one of their main competitors because it's obvious that Microsoft is taking these threats very seriously now.
Another amusing anecdote: When I started working at my current workplace, my work computer were a freshly installed W7 with IE8 using Bing. At my workplace we develop exclusively for a Windows platform, so I did a lot of searches for functions in the WinAPI. However, Bing consistently did not find the MSDN documentation - or even anything remotely similar - on the first page. When I changed the search engine to Google, the documentation was consistently the first or the second link.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Somebody's going to do much better searches than Google, which is after all, a word-based search ranked by a linking scheme.
But it's going to be hard to tell the world about it when it happens because of the enormous advantage Google has in indexing. It's so fast, it's almost an eye on the web, and that will take more hardware than will fit in anyone's garage. No one's going to finance the billions needed on the basis of a limited, meagre sample (like this very informal study).
Then there's the name recognition and holier-than-thou reputation -- tarnished by privacy issue but few people seem to care about that.
You don't really believe Microsoft's going to do it. It's got the money, but it's a big corporate bureaucracy that won't overcome the herd mentality either in business matters or in science and engineering, and therefore in R&D.
If Bing, the search engine created by the massive for-profit Microsoft corporation, is returning better results than Google and is still struggling to retain major market share, could it not be that Bing is allowing itself to be artificially more accurate just to gain ground? Once the market share is locked down, they will likely allow in more advertised results.
Huh? I'm forced to run IE8 at work.. and we have Google as the search engine default...
Go Tools, Internet Options, then click Settings under "Search"... can change it in there.
Bing scored 62 and google 53. Google lost 5 points because it didn't find an attorney named Tom Brady and Bing gained 5 points because they found it. Remove this one query and google actually wins by a point.
But what google does really well is get current results. Search for "attorney tom brady" now and you will find TFA on google, but not on bing.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Since you think that, would you think that an open source browser like Firefox should offer Bing as a default search engine ?
I mean, if Google is the bad guy, only interested in our personal data and displaying ads, and Bing the good guy only offering a search engine to help humanity, would this be the best option ?
Can't you see that there are both evil ?
See now, I see that as almost a problem, in line with the App discussion one story back. If you want to search wikipedia, add Wikipedia to your list of browser search engines. I constantly flip between Wikipedia and IMDB as a pair, and I wouldn't consider that "web searching". I'd consider those browser apps for those two sites.
Also, Rule #1 = Always Use Advanced Search. I want to know about the music group Red Box, not red cardigans and black boxes for airplanes!
"Red Box" +include music produces nearly perfect results.
(Posting AC because I modded elsewhere.)
I remember before Google, Snap.com was the single best search engine of its time but very few remember it. That's because a media company (I forget if it was ABC or whatever) decided to buy it and commercialize it to death while promoting specific queries first and not the most relevant. It was fast and it was nearly instant for dial-up connections. Of course, it died soon after it got purchased and maimed but it was a great alternative to Yahoo, Lycos/Altavista, HotBot, Dogpile etc...
I like how Google indexes my site, it does it well and it does it almost instantaneously when there are updates where-as Yahoo! and Bing both take an eternity, even WITH webmaster tools setup. Perhaps it's because my site is at an early stage of development / release and they rank sites entirely differently but if a startup website can attain almost #1 results in whatever is on the website, then I would assume that there is a problem here. In fact there is... The amount of garbage websites that you have to filter through to get your question answered these days on the big G is remarkable. I WISH there was a way you can block a website from showing up in your search results because there's always that one website that repeats itself in a single search result.
I think the author's assumption that people would search for "When are the Patriots playing next year?" rather than "patriots game schedule" is flat out wrong. People know they are using computers, and not talking to a person, and they compensate accordingly. Google therefore, also compensates accordingly, by finding every page on the internet with "patriots", "game", and "schedule" in some close proximity. They may (and probably do) do more, but Google's approach has always been index everything you possibly can, and NLP has always taken a back seat. The Bing folks on the other hand have explicitly tried to optimize for NLP cases. However which engine is better isn't a matter of can you ask it questions in English, but can someone find what they are looking for. Given that most people know that "Googling" is not the same as asking a question, it is not fair to only test NLP queries.
--"You are your own God"--
I guess not many people used it, but AltaVista Personal did an amazing job of indexing and searching local and network files. Faster than any of the "modern" OS integrated offerings I've seen. And without sucking up resources. If there were a version for XP/Vista/Win7 I'd use it in a heartbeat.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
When I do searches, Google works very well for me. I can't think of the last time I was frustrated when searching for something. So, let's say it's true that Bing is slightly better (and I'm not granting that; it's just for the sake of argument) - what's my motivation for switching to Bing if Google is already working just fine for me? My search needs are already being met.
#DeleteChrome
I found this to be true. Some of that is likely due to the fact that I have, subconsciously, tuned my queries to produce meaningful results in Google. If I were for some reason forced to use Bing for a while I suspect I would be able to produce meaningful results from it as well.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Search for a joke post I submitted anonymously on a somewhat obscure open source site (varlinux.org) ten years ago:
"Windows source code BASIC April Fool's Kollar-Kotelly"
Google: Produced post at bottom of page 1/top of page 2
Bing: post not in first five pages of results
When I Google Bing, I get 85.4 million results.
When I Bing Google, I get 213 million results.
Parse those statement and try to reach a conclusion.
Newer and less widely used search engines often have better results, because there are thousands of spammers out there trying to game the bigger search engines.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
...Google [h]as reached "Default" status ...
But is it losing the default status? My understanding is that in China people are starting to use "baidu" as a verb. "I'll baidu that" as someone in the west may now be saying "I'll google that".
:-). For a while people used "xerox" as a verb even when they started buying non-Xerox copiers.
A search engine is a pretty simple thing to replace. I don't think many users care who provides search, they just want decent results. Google will have to work hard to maintain their position or they may for the most part become a verb, well except on Android based systems
So what you have in TFA is a genius doing a completely unscientific study to cause controversy, pageviews, and whatever to get people on his site. I fault slashdot mods for this article rather than the writer who seemed to be making an honest effort, like a small boy with down's syndrome thrashing about in a pool as he is bouyed by his water wings and convinced he is swimming.
In fact, if you know something about search engines as apparently the author doesn't, you would know that google is heavily weighted towards retreiving pages based on their relationship to the words that you're searching, and isn't a magic box where you can type a question and expect to get an answer. Google doesn't answer your question, it just says "this is the best thing I have in relation to what you gave me".
So the author gave Google garbage, like "smx west agenda" or "when is trans siberian orchestra playing next in seattle", and got back what he claims to be garbage where Google got 0 points, but bing scored above 0. On the first Google returns the 2010 and the 2011 agendas in the first results and follows that with the main page for 'smx west'. On the second Google returns nearly the same question that was asked on chacha, followed by a recent article talking about TSO recently coming to seattle and third is the ticketmaster page for TSO. On bing you get the 2010 agenda first, then the main page for the 'smx west' and then a random yahoo news article talking about smx west. For TSO bing points you to the TSO tour page, tickets, and the main TSO website. The problem is that TSO doesn't HAVE a tour date for seattle, so the question is faulty to begin with, yet somehow bing outscored Google for less relevant results to the query.
I'm not a Google fanboy by any means, but if people would stop expecting their magic internet box to read their minds and somehow "know" what they're looking for, and learn to search, then they might find that Google will almost always return more relevant.
Heck, terrible articles like that are why I stopped reading search engine land a looong time ago.
I switched to Bing as my primary work search engine about six months ago and never looked back. The two things that have kept me on Bing instead of back to Google are:
1. Search results seem to return deeper to the source with Bing instead of Google. For example searches on Google seem to return to a forum where someone points to the solution, where Bing returns the solution.
2. Bing currently seems to give less credence to site scrapers.
With those two things I've found that I like how Bing:
1. Gives definitions for works better than Google.
2. When you hover over a result you get the "More on this page" feature.
What I miss the most from Google:
1. Doing math and conversions in the search field.
The difference between Google and Bing is:
Google: Google comes up with the correct results. They are on page 3, with about 60 ads piled on top of them, but they're there.
Bing: Bing will return a story about Lindsy Lohan every time. No matter what you search for, you will get at least a couple Lindsy results. Your answer might be in there... but usually not. If I'm searching for the latest Lindsy Lohan updates however, Bing is always my first choice.
Google was my choice because of its simplicity. They're systematicly destroying what made me favor them in the first place. They Bing-ified their image search just recently, and it sucks. It crashes IE if you load a 2nd page of results. Maybe they're trying to foist their own version of lockin on us.
Google needs to get back to its roots, or somebody will come along with something better. The real Google killer might even be FaceBook-based search, where real human beings in your network (or extended network) vet the results.
It seems like that, managed properly, has the potential to totally crush any algorithm when it comes to relevance. If only there were some way to do it without FaceBook...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I hardly use Google as my search engine these days. 90% or so of my search engine queries go to DuckDuckGo. I only resort to Google if I am looking for music files or something so obscure that I know Google won't provide me a list of 1000+ potential hits, half of which are marketing or shopping sites. I never use Bing, but that's because I have a general hatred for Microsoft and am trying, vigorously, to cut them out of my personal computer use entirely. I also find using some specific protocol search engines to be helpful too. There are a number of nice FTP search engines and I still like using Veronica for Gopher.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Don't forget a lot of people hate Microsoft generally for being douches. Don't really care how good Bing has gotten will never ever use it. Microsoft is a terrible company and would just as soon see them go bankrupt. What goes around come around.
If I open a topic at a large forum and Google for it 15 mins later, the result is shown on the first page. I imagine the same goes for new stories in Slashdot: you can find them using Google almost instantly after they're published.
I don't think Bing comes even close to what Google is doing.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
What happens if you google Ned Ryerson?
For pretty much everything I need to search for, Google's results have gotten progressively worse over the past couple years. I saw a huge degradation in the quality of results when they switched to their 'new engine' a couple months back: absolute terms/quoted strings (such as what I might find in a system log) have useless results requiring deep wading and a good deal of luck to find, for instance. (Either my search terms are a lot more vague and uncommon than they were 2 years ago - doubtful - or the search mechanisms suck more.)
Honestly, it appears that Google has stopped giving a damn about the actual search engine functionality. They're more interested in the ad placement "quality" and actually getting the highest paid results at the top. As a result, searching for something like an error, review, or performance metrics on hardware might result in the first couple pages being product placement. Not cool!
Saying Bing is better than Google now is more a commentary on Google's regression than it is any inherent capability that Bing might have. The Google of 3+ years ago was much better; Bing brings nothing to the table.
Honestly, I'm thinking of switching from Google outright to something that actually acknowledges my quotes (and finds the results, like Google used to) and various "search markup" syntax. I just haven't had the time/inclination to look for one that does the job, yet.
For 80%+ of all searches, I'm sure either Bing or Google are sufficient and similar. It's that 20% (or less) of technical, specific, or culturally/financially unprofitable topics which are difficult to find results on.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The first sentence of TFA contains a typo, "I can still remember when my when I first switched over to Google on the recommendation of my brother’s girlfriend." The author admits "quality" is subjective but calls the test "an objective small sample size evaluation", which is inconsistent. The points scale (5 for a "good" first result, 3 for second, 1 for third) seems arbitrary--it's not at all what I would use, at least, which would probably use total elapsed time. The final totals are very sensitive to error, because of small sample size, and no error-related issues are considered. Any reasonable error bounds should make it impossible to say whether Google beat Bing or vice versa, statistically.
The author did at least try to be objective, but the only real information TFA's test contains is "Google and Bing aren't completely incomparable in quality."
That was definitely a problem early on. From what I can tell, they fixed it. E.g. http://www.bing.com/search?q=enumdisplaysettings&form=OSDSRC now properly returns the MSDN doc, when it used to give a lot of garbage from other sites.
Do a search for a phone number. (What business does this go to?) You have to deal with 47 pages of phone number spam (How hard is it to filter out pages of sequential phone numbers?)
Do a programming search, deal with 15 Stack Overflow scraped sites.
Do a search for pretty much any topic where people would discuss it: get 15 forum "aggregators" that have the same content
Programming issues that are too challenging for Google? Or is it the fact that these sites generate ad revenue? Web 2.0 is about churn - good content is expensive to create, and it's all about CPM in 2011. (Let's say I wanted a site with 1000000 hits a day.. would I get there more with highly researched thought-provoking ideas or a forum with troll posts and 500 comments, of which 2% have any value?)
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Depends on how you look at it mate. To me what is painful, is having your search terms changed into something else because they think you are looking for it. I remember years ago walking away frustrating trying to look for motherboards with ISA slots, and getting back results for motherboard "is a". I have tried a dozen search engines, and while maybe they work for the majority of man, they return bunk for me.
Acting as if I really wanted to know the answer, I tried the Google query, chose the first hit, which was the product page for the Frigidaire FPHC2398LF (at this point if I were really doing this I would have had the clue to enter my own model number), which below the flash stuff has a navigation bar that has a button for Guides/Manuals. Click on that, click on download the English User Guide which is a PDF, and "Bing!" there in the table of contents is has "Changing the Filter" on page 15
The Bing hits for the question has as the first hit the home page of the Frigidaire web site. If I went there maybe I would think to click on the filters & accessories tab, which is a blind alley for this. Maybe I would click on the Refrigerators link and get clue that I want to look for my own model number and eventually get to that same page that was Google's first hit. The other hits on Bing had a number of reviews and links for Frigidaire appliances other than refrigerators.
I guess I would rank Google and Bing as being equally useless if I ask a question that is not specific enough to give the exact answer I want and if I am too clueless to use the results I get to track down the answer or figure out how to refine the question. In this case, Google got me about two clicks from the exact answer, Bing got me pretty much nowhere.
If as a result of this experience I realize that what I really want to search for the user manual, and next time I try that, and also indicate that I want a professional series refrigerator rather than, say, an oven, (search term frigidaire professional series refrigerator user manual) Google gets me results on the Frigidaire web site in the first two hits, Bing gets all third party sites and reviews on their first page of hits.
Who the hell still formats their search queries as full sentences? "What town was Beautiful Girls filmed in?" Really?
Microsoft thinks people use Google because they
have simply gotten used to them?
Sounds like Microsoft's business model.
Sorry, I am used to my 10 year old search engine
using my 10 year old email account, and I like their
other integrated offerings.
MSFT, as usual, you missed the boat that sailed long
ago.
Google just returns too many garbage marketing links.
http://www.emlaklobisi.com
As as former Google user I find the current interface annoying (i.e. when you hit the down key it doesn't scrolls the page down but highlights the next search result). Switching to the AntiChrist is just a no-go. So I prefer to use an emerging search engine without the big-corporation bad habits like DuckDuckGo.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
If you want a good laugh, search for "CEdit" in Google and Bing.
Google correctly provides links to documentation for the Microsoft MFC CEdit control.
Bing thinks you're looking for credit information.
Microsoft is to inept they can't even make a search engine that finds their own products.
I always use google for searching. I get what I'm looking for usually at page one at one of the first results... 'nuf said for my case.
Here's the secret to immortality:
I'm getting more and more annoyed at Googles "new" features that cannot be disabled. First it was the useless sidebar I rarely use that takes up space and cannot be turned off.. Now it is the absurdly poorly designed instant previews that comes up whenever you sneeze. I can no longer even click anywhere in a browser to gain focus on the window without the stupid instant preview engaging.
Google et al are effectivly sponsoring spam sites which have no value other than wasting time and serving up ads to make money from their ad content network. I'm sure this was not their intention but it is what happened and they have not done shit to effectivly stop it. It has gotten to the point where when I type an RFC into google the first few hits are not IETF but some stupid scraped content site plastered with ads.
As I could not stand being bothered by the instant previews anymore I started using bing as my default search and switch to google later if needed. Google has a deeper set of results.. it finds more stuff that bing completely overlooks however bing is really not too bad for most things and it is very fast like google. It seems to be improving while googles results seem to be devolving as more and more people find ways to take advantage of their stagnating ranking algorithms.
AltaVista respected punctuation. If you're searching for something with a dash in it, for example, or for the use of some operator in a programming language, AltaVista found it for you.
Google strips your punctuation right away, making it largely useless for such searches.
Bing is like sooooo cool, they should bring out their own browser!
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
In what units is relevance measured? Who can take this article seriously? Next I'll post an article on global warming backed up by in-depth interviews with 6 people I met on the bus.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
You can't do an exact text search on Google. It's all down hill since they removed that.
Try doing a search for a [FILE] error on the Cache product.
Google will strip the [] and ignore the case thus turning a unique combination of search terms into 20.3 million results that are all wrong.
Google doesn't even honor quotes. Search for a phrase in quotes and it returns pages that don't contain both words. That's a fail state.
I find being offended by me offensive.
What would be useful for determining this properly would be a website or just a search plug-in that uses both search engines and presents both sets of results in a split screen, choosing which side each is on at random. Find a few hundred volunteers to install this for a month and log which site is chosen most often.
This way we'd get a non-biased set of results based on real world searching. All of this is technically quite simple for a competent web programmer (a term which really does not apply to me), it just needs someone to actually be bothered enough to try it.
I think I went from Lycos hosted at CMU (and later hosted on their own servers) to Alta Vista to Excite to Google. (I was bummed when DejaNews got bought out by Google because even then I sensed that was the beginning of the end of usenet.)
I think Bing will be good for the end-user because it will keep Google honest however I don't think Bing will exceed/succeed Google.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
I do internet based research. In my daily findings Google *TROUNCES* everything else, including Bing. Sorry, can't believe what is being said here.
Images are something people search for, but there's never any comparison on them. In my experience google provides a lot more while bing is far, far better at delivering specific results.
Now that google.pt is a façade of google.br (or whatever is called) please implement some localized version if bing that will get results from actual portuguese pages and not from servers an ocean away. If you're too busy, I'll need a rack of servers and some extra programming power you may have lying around - we're not a big country, but since google forgot that Portugal and Brazil are different countries, and that local engines are just proxies to google, I need this in a hurry. Pleeease?
All I know is that when the Bing commercials first started hitting TV, they created a new buzzword: "Search Overload". It was identified as search engine's inability to detect the context of queries.
My computer is in the same room as my tv, so I went over to bing.com and typed in the query "Search Overload". The first result was a webpage for the Talking Heads' album Overload. Further down the page was a "search" button. I tried the same query in Google, and it brought up an article about Microsoft's advertising campaign.
The ironic result from Bing's search is merely circumstantial evidence, but it is enough to keep me from ever turning to it again.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Google is nothing but frustrating as of late, but I've had no better results with Bing. Or even Lycos - yes, haha, Lycos *is* still around, I got nostalgic and drunk one night...
I'm honestly not sure who to blame. While I think Google does a lot of stupid things (the crap that is live search)... The fact is, there are exponentially more crappy sites on the Internets now than there were a few years ago. Given that all search engines return crap results these days, I can't help but think that's part of the problem.
They gave Hamas an A. They'll give anyone an A if you send them a few hundred bucks. Maybe not a good "hard data source." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w6Oick8x48
I take complete ownership of a horrendously non-scientific sample size of this test. This is much more spot check than anything else. I did, in fact, use actual searches from my own use (and I still haven't fixed the damn fridge, but I do have a new Tom Brady jersey).
You can see from some of the divergent opinions on this list that the gap between the quality of results from Google and Bing has narrowed. However crappy my methodology may have been, the comments here and elsewhere confirm this general hypothesis. What is really interesting (to me) is that Google continues to be, far and wide the preferred search engine. Which brings up a major question: what would it take to unseat the market leader and is that even possible?
-Conrad from Avvo
Bing's first page of hits consists of 2 different links to LinkedIn, My Facebook profile, entries with people with my name on 123People.com and MyLife.com (both basically white pages from the phone company, two links to my personal blog (one of which is an article), A Zoom Info (business directory) entry for my blog (WTF?), a comment I made on someone else's blog and my profile on that same blog. There is a footer of "images of Lee Malatesta" but none of the images are of me.
Google's first page of hits is my personal blog with 3 sub entries for specific articles on my personal blog, my Facebook profile, the same two LinkedIn links as Bing lists, two comments I wrote on Will Wilkinsen's blog, and my profile on the same blog that Bing found.
Google's hits are far less spammy (no 123People, no pseudo business directories) and far more representative of my online presence. But I guess those results are very much in line with the results of the study by the SEO firm. Bing returns spammier results.
I'm having the same problem adjusting to DuckDuckGo which I've switched to because I think Google's getting crap. I think it's returning better results than Google, and has a few neat features like disambiguation, but I've got so used to Wikipedia being the top or second hit for just about everything I'm finding it annoying.
Limiting NLP to english only is also skewing results.
Limiting NLP to English only on whose part?
People know they are using computers, and not talking to a person, and they compensate accordingly.
In a lot of cases, people are aware of an idea and can express that idea but don't know the canonical name for that idea.
FWIW:
Over 77 Percent of Lifehacker Readers Say Google's Search Results are Less Useful Lately
FYI, this is what better research (empirical, more samples) looks like:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Science Fault Detected! Engaging TL;DR.
Indeed, and I'd like to know what precisely is "quasi" about the "empirical"ness of it? Seems to me it is completely empirical and that neither "quasi", "empirical" nor "quasi-empirical" would have very much to do with scientific worth.
first i`d love to know how he came up with that scale he used, minus points seem a bit random, seems a bit unbalanced, what exactly is an "authority" in some of those searches; such as the one about someones name
2nd with 20 results anyone with any stats background should go "meh, do it better", even more so with the only 9 points difference, when one search can change to difference in the scores by 14
3rd who uses correct grammar when searching and then sometimes throws in random keywords i could never fit into a sentence such as "best advanced all mountain ski", seems like he`s trying to find flukes
4th and most importantly, ITS ONE GUY, with his own views, style of searching, etc. and he even states his view in it, talking about proving to himself that bing is better then google
it smells like datamining
warning pointless sig
Google search results are driving me crazy sometimes. Not sure if it's Google's through or "article duplicator" sites. Search for recent tech articles (e.g. specific CES product details) and it just comes back with many hits of the exact same article duplicated by many not-so-legit looking websites. I wish they have a "site blacklist" user feature where I can tell it to not bother returning results from that site ever again.
A few months/a year back, there were those *.info domains search hits too. Some sort of dynamic page generation that aggregates pieces of paragraphs with the search term. The whole article seems randomly composed, taking sentences from unrelated articles and mixing them up so that it "looks" complete... until you start reading through it and figured it doesn't make sense...
Google, please give me an "unlike"/"thumbs down" button for your search results, so that these junk site can forever disappear from my search radar... Equivalent to "Adblock" like or an option to "prompt for cookies" so I can manually get rid of it!
Results on specific tech question searches on the other hand are pretty good (e.g. gcc issues, etc.)...
If Bing works for him, then good for him! Let him use Bing since it works for him. On my case, Google very often returns the things I am searching. Actually I can't remember when was the time that what I am looking for is not on the first page, if not the first hit.
More and more I've found in order to get relevant hits, I need to include '-' before marketing page terms such as:
-"buy now"
-"add to cart"
-ebay
^^vv<><>BA
Who else has banners on MSN.com that trigger fake searches in Bing? As an advertiser that would piss me off.
Saam is a business background (not stats, not tech, not anything, just an MBA). He now lives in Renton, WA and owns a company that works CLOSELY with MS (hence AWO is based on .net).
And a guy picks 20 queries, does not even do the math correctly (awards bing more points), and then claims that Bing is a winner.
Worse, several posters on his page point out that they got radically different results on various items, and if done by his methodology, it appears that Google is the winner.
Anybody see an issue here? Yeah.....I wonder if AWO is the next Gartner.
Windbourne (moderating).
Microsoft pumps cash into SearchEngineLand.com to help dismal outlook.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
So far I do not see an https://www.bing.com/
Ever since Google stated returning results from sites like efreedom over the source content from stackoverflow, I've found myself using Bing more and more. While I know I can search with the "site:stackoverflow.com" hint, the fact that I have to do that and that Google has fallen prey to so many sites gaming their results has just made it less frustrating for me to search Bing first. I have to wonder why Google wants me to be logged in so badly when I'm searching so that it can "personalize" my results, but then they give me no ability to remove certain sites from ever coming up in those results. The relationship with Google and its users is very one-sided.
... is a specific issue afflicting both Google and Bing.
I am a customer/victim of TimeWarner Cable, and therefore I cannot view the NFL Network on my TV. Not even as a premium channel.
But I can watch a free live streaming video of the game from mostly (entirely?) overseas web sites. I used to find a site by typing, say, "free live video Eagles Bears" into Google, and then picking one of the first 5 or 6 links.
Recently, Google will return several PAGES of results that all lead to sites that want me to PAY to watch. The free sites are still there, but buried deep in a mass of pay sites.
I tried doing my searches on Bing, but got the same (lack of) results. I sure wish one of the two would clean up their act. Whichever one cures the spam flood issue first should get a big advantage over the other.
I'm pretty sure by then you would also have gotten strange looks if you said you googled yourself.
Especially when you used the yahoo google portal.
"I Google myself on my Yahoo all the time!"
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
Sample size is not the only relevant metric. Whats next? You'll be complaining about how polling a few thousand people can give information on how a few hundred million people vote?
You are stupid. But hopefully now you know it.
So here's some more data, this time using the UK sites of each search engine and the kind of terse search times I tend to use. The result's a draw - see below.
I thought up 12 searches (got bored after that arbitrarily small number) then put them into bing and Google and evaluated the top 5 results + adverts returned to find a winner. You'll just have to take my word for it that I have no relationship with Google or Microsoft.
bbc iplayer dr who GOOGLE
nhs headache DRAW
vat rise when date BING
queensland flooding BING
[image search] emperor penguin chick GOOGLE
[map search] birmingham nec directions to london GOOGLE
buy morphy richards toaster BING
fiction bestsellers cheap GOOGLE
kings speech arts cinema [a uk town] DRAW
stephen hawking physicist GOOGLE
rorshach ink blots BING
uk pensions advice BING
So, 5 Google wins, 5 bing wins and 2 draws. I agree that there is little to choose between these search engines in terms of quality of results returned.
Faster only because every single product they make is only half completed.
Actually, faster because Google employs lean methods and doesn't subscribe to the false notion that the kind of products it produces -- whether its own or those of its competitors -- are ever "completed". Since both they and their competitors have products which are updated over time, the one who gets the product in the hands of interested users and gets them attached and involved and receiving value early, gets feedback quicker, and gets the improvements important to its user base out quicker wins.
Any effort that is expended but is waiting on a release schedule to get into the hands of consumers where it delivers value is a form of waste, and Google's approach is to minimize that kind of waste.