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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.
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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
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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