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."

Comments

Bing is great for non-techies

[nlawalker]

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.

OK, I took a shot at it,

[Compaqt]

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.

"Better" didn't help Yahoo.

[Animats]

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.)

not for my searches

[siddesu]

I use about six languages on a daily basis and IMHO bing sucks at everything that isn't English.

Attorney Tom Brady

[Col. Klink (retired)]

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.

Re:Attorney Tom Brady

[ugen]

That "current bias" on Google is, imho, more of a liability than an advantage.
Once any term becomes at least somewhat popular, it also becomes "self-sustaining" on Google - which means that any attempts to look for truly relevant information bring up only more and more recent "meta-discussions".
This also means that finding anything that hasn't happened recently on Google becomes more and more difficult. Their time-based index is severely broken (showing recent results as if they are from the past etc).

Re:Small sample is right

[Archangel Michael]

I try Bing about once a month for a day. I'm constantly changing back to Google to find the results I'm looking for. It isn't for lack of trying, but the result is that I can't stand Bing. I've even begun to suggest that BING stands for "Bing Is Not Google".