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Bing More Effective Than Google?
Xiph1980 writes "Experian Hitwise claims Bing and Bing-powered search to be more effective than Google. The success rate for Bing searches in the U.S. in July was 80.04%, compared to 67.56% for Google. The market watcher defines 'success rate' as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website. Searches made through sites owned by Yahoo, which farmed out search to Bing under a deal struck in 2009, were also more efficient than Google. Those searches yielded a success rate of 81.36%. The claims of Hitwise don't explain why I keep finding things like Microsoft service pack download pages better through google than through bing."
The claims of Hitwise don't explain why I keep finding things like Microsoft service pack download pages better through google than through bing.
That's because unlike Google, Bing doesn't favor its own services over others. Google favors their news service, maps, YouTube, shopping and every other service over others. Bing returns results objectively.
There are also differences in algorithms. Bing doesn't count so called junk-links while Google does. Bing prefers link inside good, relevant content. Google, on the other hand, counts all kinds of links. That's also why Google is full of shitty results, as SEO spammers game the system by spamming links to blog comments and every other place where they can get it. As Bing doesn't count those links almost at all it means their results are much more cleaner.
The problem Bing is facing is that they cannot get as much user data from searchers as Google. They miss a lot of long-tail keyword data that Google gets just because of their dominant market share. They also miss a lot of data of what result user thinks is relevant and good for the search query (both Google and Bing track which result user clicks on) and how much they spend on the site (both services again track if you return back from that result - if you come back quickly, it's obviously worthless result for the query). This is also the same reason why Bing toolbar gathers that data on users who use Google - the same thing that somehow got twisted in slashdotters heads as Bing scraping and stealing results from Google. The only thing they do is collect that click data.
Judging by the usual slashdot response of "but they should just improve their algorithms", people don't seem to get how immersively complex current search engines and their algorithms are. It's not just about following links on other websites - we have been past that for almost 10 years now. Algorithms are the base of the search engine, but they're almost worthless without all the keyword and usage data that really powers them. That is also why Google is so keen to collect every single piece of information they can get their hands on.
Microsoft has done a lot of things correctly with Bing. I would say their algorithms are even better than Google's, as they're able to compete with much smaller market share and data against Google and actually provide better results. It has come a long way from the Windows Live Search days.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
So Google users browse their choices more than Bing users. That's predictable. If you let Bing be your search of choice you probably don't discern.
Just become somebody clicks through to the site doesn't mean the search result was a success.
Google is my preferred search engine, but the results are noticeably geek slanted. That's perfect for me, I am a geek. However it is not what everyone wants. Bing I find does a better job giving what a non-technical user might be after. You have to remember that as a tech person, what you are interested in may not mesh with what non-tech people are interested in.
So for me, Google it is, but that may not be true for everyone.
"The market watcher defines 'success rate' as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website."
Well there's your problem right there. Google users are more technical than Bing users; we tend to use search engines for things other than visiting websites.
Take calculator and define for example. I don't need to click anything after searching, because google tells me the answer directly. I would say that's more effective than making me click through for currency conversions and dictionary definitions.
The market watcher defines "success rate" as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website.
These finding may be interesting and can be interpreted in many ways, but it's completely arbitrary to associate "success rate" with the percentage of queries that resulted in a visit to a website.
Just one example for an exception: maybe the "blurb" offered by Google gives you more information, sometimes even to the point of giving you the answer you were looking for. Search for "first apollo launch" on both Google and Bing. I'm getting more dates in the blurbs on Google than Bing. Now search for "barack obama age" -- Google actually answers the question: "Best guess for Barack Obama age is 50 years (August 4, 1961)".
There are plenty of other reasons for why queries don't lead to websites. This has practically nothing to do with "success rate".
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I use Bing for recipes and things that normal people search for. I use Google for anything technical since bing appears to be clueless about that stuff.
Google works if you already know how to use a search engine. My Mom doesn't know how to ask google good questions, so she needs to use Bing to find when the special church service is in her town.
Manh times I use google for other things than performing a search and even sometimes search preview isenough for me.
I guess that bing users don't use it that way, so things like this could distort results.
Please, define "the success rate for a search engine"". I'm so curious.
Provided that it could make any sense, I thought that it was "0" (zarro) if you answer "no page found" and "1" (uno) otherwise.
Like in searching (please type with quotes) "alberocomix". Both answers with "zarro pages found".
Mut maybe I'm too far from this search engine marketing stuff to understand.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The problem with Bing is that I am not using it, thus it results in 0% success rate in my case.
I am not using it because of a conscious decision to avoid it, I'd sooner use altavista or lycos or infoseek (wait, is that still around?) Infoseek is dead and I would still rather use that than bing.
You can't handle the truth.
Perhaps there are more hits to websites. However often I just want to know one thing, yet I still need to go to several sites to get the information I want.
With Google I need to visit less websites then if I would use Bing.
I often use both Google AND Yahoo and I am glad they give different results as one will have some that the other doesn't. At least not on the first page.
I also often use http://search.yippy.com/ as I like the clouds it places things in. Makes it sometimes faster.
It is a pity that there are not more search engines. Basically all are based on a few. Bing and Google as a basis.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
... to be considered as a real search engine.
A few weeks ago, when Google excluded some Belgian press websites from it's indexing, the removal immediately propagated to Bing and other reprocessing engines.
Bing tries to compete with Google, but it is really just a front end for Google, with a few tweaks and adjustments. If tomorrow Google decided to take preventive actions against Bing, like preventing it from leeching results, would Bing still be in the competition?
More Bing users are search beginners, and are therefore more likely to click through on the first link without taking the information into account to come up with a more refined query.
I reckon this is because SEO's and link farm scum are throwing all their weight at gaming Google rather than Bing.
I still haven't forgiven Microsoft for pounding, and I mean pounding, a self-hosted (long story) site for a small retailer I worked for a few years ago. We got a nearly $1000 bill for excess bandwidth. I checked the logs and they were downloading entire directories of images over and over and over. Non-techy Boss NOT impressed.
That may have been true in the past, but Google now has many templates for answering natural language questions. Search for "how big is a leopard" on both Google and Bing. You get your answer on the first page on both. Now try "where is minsk" -- Google will give you move information on the results page than Bing.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
If I'm looking up the name of something (via related criteria), or searching for a particular statistic, my ideal is to find it displayed in one of the website titles or excerpts without ever having to click anything.
Google also displays dictionary entries, etc. so that I can generally lookup words and get the definition right in the results.
Many times I consider a result "successful" when I don't find what I'm looking for--it was evident from the results that the object or information I wanted did not exist, so, while disappointing, Google did the job I wanted it to do.
I think a far better test is whether, after searching for something, small keyword alterations are made. Granted, many times there is a level of human refinement where people start off not knowing quite what they're looking for, but I think there is probably a much better correlation of people trying different words because they didn't find what they wanted than not-clicking anything. Basically, if people are coming away from Google and Bing equally satisfied, and Bing users click more, that means Bing is less effective and making its users do more work to get their info.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
What about searches that were a mistake and corrected.
I admit that sometimes I use google as a spell checker and never click through to a page. I'm sure other people do this.
I have consistently found google more effective. My suspicion is that this is because I am usually looking for information as opposed to products.
I don't believe the post. I mean that it is probably something like the "get the facts" campaign that MS used in the past.
But, in the very hypothetical case that MS won the search war, get prepared to pay for this service. Get prepared to pay a lot if you want "high quality" answers. Get prepared for answers that MS thinks they are "appropriate". And get prepared to have no other search engine that bing, because MS knows how to destroy competition.
And no, american anti-trust (application) is a joke.
Maybe it's just that those who choose to use Bing as search engine are more likely to click links? or they are easier to please with the returned results set? Correlation does not imply causation. It will be difficult to make conclusions without having one study group using both.
Yahoo users are dweebs that click links no matter how relevant.
So the MS shill didn't even notice that Yahoo BEAT Bing? It's just an afterthought huh? K, go collect your MS paycheck now.
Google cache
Agreed - I generally find my answers on the first page of a Google search.
But, I can't get past the definition for "success" in the summary. There are times when I Google something, and the answer appears in the summary - no need to click any links.
If you're measuring "success" in terms of dollars and cents changing hands somewhere, yeah, Bing is probably a success. If you're measuring "success" in terms of searchers finding the data they are looking for, I'll put my money on Google.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Who funded the research?
It does often tend to skew the results in the favour of the person who commissioned the report.
I've noticed lately that google isn't nearly as sharp at finding the results I want. If I search for terms 'x', 'y', and 'z', google will sometimes give me a page with terms 'x' and 'y' but not 'z'. 'z' is on pages that link to the results, but google doesn't tell me this. If there are no pages with 'x', 'y', and 'z' on them then so be it, but don't give me pages that I don't want.
rant over.
The market watcher defines 'success rate' as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website.
What matters is the much harder to measure percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website that actually contains what you want.
If you let Bing be your search of choice you probably don't discern.
That's a baseless statement.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I wonder if there might, in addition to other contributing factors mentioned here, be a difference in user-segmentation and corresponding expectations.
I often see non-tech users searching for things like "facebook" in a search-engine instead of typing it in the location-bar, of course with great success. My prejudice tells me Bing might have a much larger share of those easy searches than other engines.
Let's ask two popular search engines the same simple question:
"Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks?"
Seriously. Try it on Bing, then try it on Google.
Game over.
---------------------------------------
Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Given that Bing uses Google in order to find results (old news, but proven definitively by Google tweaking their own search results to reach a specific, unrelated page, and then using Bing and showing the results there altered the same way),
You missed a step -- they then had to force the link into the Bing index by a deceptive strategy. Bing doesn't particularly care about Google (otherwise the other links they didn't click on would have shown up in Bing) - it marginally cares about every page visited by someone who has the Bing toolbar installed, and if you make up a new word (as they did), and ensure that the only data that exists is from people clicking specifically on your link (as they did, by instructing their employees to keep clicking the link) you can get that into the index whatever site the link is on. You could use the same technique to make it seem like Bing was copying its results from your blog, a porn site, or anywhere else you can stick a link up for a non-existent word (that won't get swamped by real data) and pay an army of people to click on it.
So when I google for "google" with instant search, will it count as a search for:
-g
-go
-goo
-goog
-googl
-google
That's 6 searches, and I may click on none, realizing I'm already at the page that I was looking for.
But, but., why don't you have your Windows systems set to auto-brick^h^h^h^h^hupdate?
Seriously, I use Google to make the Microsoft VS help usable. VS help is reasonably useful for specific syntax for a supported method/function. It is utterly useless, in my experience, to decide which method/function to use in the first place, whereas Google usually has an answer located within the first 20 links.
IMO, there are serious deficiencies in Google (word1-word2, as a hyphenated string, for example), but I think, once I get the hang of custom searches associated with my gmail account, it will be usable for a wider range of queries.
Showing results for spelling. Search instead for speling.
"The market watcher defines 'success rate' as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website."
From that, I would assume Bing just makes the results a lot less clear.
How many searches are done whyle typing a single search in Google?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
In fact if you use a hosts file and adblock+ bing.com doesn't even load properly. If you use the bing search bar in FF or Chrome it works but formatting is all screwed up.
Lately it is *too* smart. When I'm searching for a specific term that happens to be a bit uncommon, I keep having to do my query like this:
"relatively_uncommon_word" -"common_word_with_similar_spelling"
Because it keeps guessing incorrectly that I actually want the common word instead of the one that I entered that is spelled similarly. I'm fine with the "Did you mean ... whatever" suggestions, but when Google uses those suggestions automatically in searches it gets really annoying. It means I keep entering my search, cursing at the wrong answer, and re-entering the search with the "-" on the common words before clicking on any links. Usually it only takes one failed search like that, but there are some occasions where I have had to eliminate two or even three words before I get what I want. I don't know what Bing does in this regard, but I'm wondering if a stupider search engine would be better in some ways compared to the way Google currently is.
If you let Bing be your search of choice you probably don't discern.
That's a baseless statement.
I have tried Bing on many occasions because I'm tired of Google's brokenness and new "features" it keeps rolling out*. Unfortunately, Bing still frequently returns things that I'm not interested in. Conversely, I rarely end up with a Google search that doesn't send me to what I want to find.
*I am completely fed up with Google's hijacking of my search terms -- Google used to predict what you wanted to search for and suggest it to you. Now it just takes you to where it thinks you want to go, and you're lucky if it'll spit out a "did you mean?" More troublesome is that frequently, where it thinks I want to go is completely ridiculous and nonsensical. Here's a real scenario: I searched for "united states weather radar". Google returned "Showing results for "unted states weather ra". Search instead for "united states weather radar". Who searches for "weather ra"?? This happens several times a day to me.
I get better results through Google. I am just one user of a very limited though active demographic group. Bing might deliver more of what the average joe wants, but I wouldn't know that because I am more of an average "cecil" than an average joe.
Using Instant? That happens occasionally with me on Chrome/Chromium. Typing something, I see the link I want in the awesome bar suggestions, but before I can select the link, the search happens. Bloody annoying.
that's because google power-users can distinguish between vanilla icecream and a piece of shit on-sight, we don't have to taste.
What if I don't want to find any service packs? If I search for libre office, should I expect unbiased results from Bing? I don't think so!
By the way, what happened to http://www.google.com/linux ??
it's not doing it to me. typing gctrl-V in Opera's adress bar does tkae me to"united states weather radar" results, no "did you mean"
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I find it amazing that an article about clicking links is even commented on by slashdot readers... so many of whom don't click the link or rtfa :D
Interesting results, Google has pretty much the same (IMDB Shaft first) while Bing actually finds that exact question in some wordpress blog.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Not only are Google's instant answers a wealth of knowledge without ever having to click on, but if you are searching for facts and you're capable of structuring a sentence in a way that is likely to contain that fact you can often end up with your answer in the summaries of the links.
In the world of science any research result should be analized "after making all the rest fixed".
It would be just too easy to note that the "typical" Bing user is some complete computer illiterated who bounght a computer with windows, found explorer as default browser, found bing as default search engine, and after searching will click each and every link produced by the search engine; the "typical" google user is someone who will probably decide to refine the keyword he/she used for search after a glimpse at the first result titles.
Did these "researchers" compensate the study for the changes in age/gender/education level/computer knowledge/interests in the cohorts ? Nope... ok I can prove that Jesus died for flu manipulating science in that way...
I've used Google less and less since they went to instant. The giant previews are maddening to me. My job is helping people (and companies) with technologies and it seems most people don't even know what a search engine is anymore, they just know to Google this or that. To some non-techs it seems they view Google as this magical, giant, world-wide, all-knowing website. Weird.
Although there seems to be a contingent of people (older people and for some reason attorneys) that are still going strong using Yahoo or MSN.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I have to agree, except for some l33t it didn't add much.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If 80.04% of searches were successful for Bing, multiply that by their user population and get an even smaller number.
Do I really need to say anything else?
And in mine, I find I get the best results when I search using -.com. Probably won't be as effective at weeding out the commercial garbage once the "name your top level domain" system is in full swing though.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I define a successful search as one that provides the answer without making visit another website.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Here are your unbiased results.
http://www.bing-vs-google.com/?q=Libre+Office
When it comes to technical knowledge, I agree with you. I've used Bing on occasion to find Microsoft software related questions, but without the same success as with Google. I've even used Bing from within Microsoft's own knowledgebase and *still* find results better from Google than using Microsoft's own tools on their own sites.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Rarely? Seriously?
Because in my case, Google has the extremely annoying habit around 30%+ of the time of changing my search query to something largely unrelated. And even when it doesn't say "Searching for XXX. Click here to search for YYY", 90% of the time it pretends words in my search query aren't actually relevant. It's a rare query where I don't have to make multiple goes at it, trying to figure out how to make Google actually take notice of the parts of the query that are actually important.
Google is about as fucking useless as search engines can get these days. It promotes quantity over quality, failing miserably to provide a half way useful service. About the only times you can get it to "find" something relevant are:
And you know what? I could probably "create" a search engine that does the first three pretty easily too.
Add to that the fuck-up that means a simple click-to-focus results in your browser screeching to a halt for a few seconds as it renders a thumbnail allowing you to check the color scheme of one of the search results (SRSLY?! WTF?), and you have to seriously wonder what their priorities are.
I don't want to rag on Google. They've provided an excellent email system, Google Apps is an awesome concept and idea, Google Docs likewise. I love Android, I really do. But the thing that's missing from their portfolio is a quality search engine.
I could create a better, more useful, search engine than Google. I'm not saying that because I have a high opinion of myself, I don't, it's just I can pretty much guarantee that while my search engine would suck, it would just suck less. The real question is not "Why is Bing better than Google", it's "How much better would Bing be if it wasn't trying to copy Google"?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If it doesn't show up in the first page or two in a google search, it means that what I'm looking for isn't out there, which is often.
If you have a good connection, instant is brutal. Its minimum time gap is tiny -- about as fast as the auto-suggest. I often start typing something and it decides to load assets while I type (news, maps, images, video), so it just slows me down. On a fast computer with a good keyboard I can type fast enough so it doesn't trigger instant-search, but on a netbook it's maddening.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Look, Microsoft - You can't just post Bing fairy tales on Slashdot and expect people to start liking it. Especially not when the recent Android extortion threats are fresh in Slashdotter's minds.
Thanks for trying though.
They don't have to have a good match on search results ... put in 'Popcorn' and they get 'crap' for results, they'll go to the page anyway.
This reminds me I need to start using Bing more. I have been using Google since I gave up on meta searches years ago. Competition is good and I agree with another posted that Google has started giving 3 term search results with only the 2 more popular terms. I have to +term to get what I want/need.
HOWEVER I greatly dislike how Microsoft has opened a frontal assault on Google Toolbar using their new IE 9 platform. Something like 'plugins may be slowing you down', disable them now, and then it shows a graphic that "proves" Google Toolbar is slowing your down with a nearly full red bar.
I did notice atleast one thing. The summary from Google is better than the one from Bing. Maybe the people from Bing made the choice to make the page shorter so people need less scrolling.
New things are always on the horizon
this is what i was looking for a few years ago and it was a very deceiving experience! no single hotel popped up in google.
retried today:
* bing only returns spammy entries
* google, too... but on the right side you get a nice map of venice with an orange dot for each hotel it has found. clicked on it and i get the details, sometimes even with prices.
well, google passed the test, bing didn't.
ah, and if you wonder how we found an hotel in venice: we got there without having booked anything and a guy from a hotel asked us at the train station if we were looking for a bed... even better than google!
This does not appear to be a "blind" test (humans searching should be randomized, not know which engine they are using). These stats don't show, for example, whether the person choosing Bing may likely to be the same type of person to click through earlier, or whether the high quality photos on bing lead a person to have more confidence in earlier search results. While it might be enough evidence to suggest the hypothesis that Bing is more "effective", it fails to support a "claim" of such. I would be interested in the results of a blind test of random individuals with the search engine cloaked, not interested in peoples hypotheses of causes of historical data.
Gently reply
Google Search does none of those things if used properly. If you're this incapable at figuring out how to use a search engine, I'd hate to see you placed in front of a command line interpreter.
That is in luring user to click on something that looks like result user want. User may have other opinion.
I did not find this to be the case when I was just rebuilding my wifes laptop from a failed drive. I ran into a nasty problem with Windows Update not working and SP1 not installing on Windows 7 and was doing searches using Bing because it was the default search in IE. I was searching for kb articles and other information related to the issue (I ended up having to replace two corrupt files in c:\windows\servicing\packages\ from an update that went wrong) by extracting them from an msu file, which was diagnosed by the System Update Readiness Tool from Microsoft.)
To that end all I had to do was search for the related KB article and download the msu file. Bing is giving me traditional chinese pages, other languages, but not the one article I need with the one link to download the file. I recall there was an option for English only links; still no joy. You'd think this would be a cake walk using Bing since the OS, KB article, and search engine creator are one and the same.
So, I did what I usually do and changed the search engine to Google, search for my KB article, download the package, replace the files, and my misery is ended.
This problem is without Instant. Instant produces a whole lot more maddening problems. One big one is that I'll be typing something, and a suggestion will come down, and then it will auto-search for that suggestion and change everything that I was typing in the search box.
Another problem I frequently have with Instant is that I will type something (e.g., "us weather radar"), and it will search for exactly what I type instantly. And I will see the exact result I want. And then in less than one second, must faster than I can move the mouse and click what I want, it will clear all the search results and automatically search for the stupid thing that it wants (e.g., "us weather ra").
As for Google Chrome, I am frequently unhappy at the awesome bar when I type something like "www.cnn.com", hit the Enter button, and instead of taking me to cnn.com, it takes me to some place that I visited yesterday that it autocompleted for me.
It's incredibly frustrating that new "features" within the past year are very much making Google a less-useable search engine, despite its tendency to provide vastly better results.
I got a new computer and didn't bother messing with the new IE, figured I was just going to be gaming, I had other machines for browsing. I'm sincerely hoping there are markets that Bing does better in, but I'm strongly doubting bing gets used by gamers, because the results for video games are TERRIBLE. Any time I used Bing to look up cheats, faqs, videos, mods, etc., I was always swamped with a bunch of useless links, none of which even show up in google. My fourteen year old niece informs me Bing stands for "Because it's not Google".
It doesn't do it all the time. Sometimes it may just be a glitch. But it happens to me in Firefox and Chrome on multiple computers in multiple countries, and it happens with random things all the time... most often more than once a day.
I was actually explaining my problem to someone else when I tried "united states weather radar" as an example and it worked. I took a screenshot that time.
http://i.imgur.com/d0wNX.png
I completely forgot about instant. I disabled it a long while back, but at least I don't spam forum complaining about it when it's so easy to disable.
http://www.ehow.com/video_4432449_use-plus-sign-google-search.html
Let's see how the plus sign affects our searches. The plus sign in front of a term forces Google to use that term in its search. In other words, it forces Google to search for that term. And this is convenient for two scenarios, one is that is that if you have small words like the word the, or at, or and, about, after for, those words are called stop words and Google usually does not search for them. It usually will only search for the main word, the object word and it will disregard those small words. So, if you want Google to search for that word, included in your search you can always put a plus sign next to it, and now it will have to search for that term follows the sign, and don't put any space after the plus sign. It should be a plus that's right next to the word. The other scenario where the plus sign comes in handy is when you want to tell Google to search for a specific term and not use any similarities to that term. Like, for example, the search of favorite book. Now Google will probably come up with results that are, could be, a list of books, because it's going to take the singular and it's going to apply it to, it's going to also search for the plural of books. Or because the word book is found in the plural form of the books, without the s at the end. So it's going to give you long list, but if you only wanted to search for the singular for favorite book and not return lists, you can put a plus sign before the word book and Google will be forced to only return results, bring up results that only have the word book and not books in the plural. So this forces Google to use that specific search term.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
How many old people and "mom" figures use yahoo/bing to search for www.facebook.com instead of going directly to the website itself? This statistic means nothing without looking at the search criteria and the habits of users.
Who searches for "weather ra"??
Mortal,
That search may be made by someone confused about Egyptian mythology. The answer is: I handle the Sun and Creation. Weather is handled by my son, Set.
You're welcome,
Ra
Heliopolis
I don't know about anyone else, but one of the joys of Google for me is the ability to burn through my boredom time by typing in absolutely ridiculous things and seeing what sort of websites come up. I don't think I am unique in this, so it's pretty clear to me that while this study is interesting, making the title 'Bing More Effective Than Google?" is akin to claiming that Haiti's space program is more successful than ours, because they've never had a single failed mission
I hate Microsoft and their joke of an operating system, but I have to say it. I went over to using Bing because of the "Google Instant" and "Did you mean <insert some random, unrelated, similar-sounding crap here>"
I'll go back to Google when they get rid of both of those aneurism-inducing monstrosities and draw and quarter the perpetrators. Yes, Bing is a piece of crap, but at the moment, it's less of a piece of crap than Google, IMHO.
.
That definition of "success rate" highlights the possibility that google may be more effective in placing a relevant site at the top of the results list. So the user will tend to click on one only site per search; while for bing, so-so results are spread throughout the results list, requiring many click-throughs to find a useful site in the results list.
Maybe instead of ranting and admonishing, you could provide us with some examples of how you search - some sample queries.
As it stands, your post is one I would ignore. Angry people are irrational, and no one reading it knows whether it's just because you suck at formulating queries or you just search for obscure things or what. And while you rant about how much Google sucks, you provide no comparison to any other service.
It's really all just noise. No way to make any rational sense out of it.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
Their claim does not prove anything even if true. The demographics of Google, Yahoo, and Bing users are different, and maybe Bing users tend to click on the first thing that pops up in their search results and Google users tend to be more selective.
We know, for instance, that there are far more single word queries on bing and yahoo (ie: people searching for a major brand rather than typing in brand.com into their browser URL bar). These kinds of queries have near 100% success rates in terms of leading to a clicked result.
The maps for our state are far better quality and newer on bing maps than on Google maps. I still usually use google maps, as I like the interface better, but switch to bing when I want to see something on the background image.
I usually start with Google for searches as well, but the quality has been going down for years, now dominated by marketing sites. The real results often don't start until page 2, 3, or 4.
Find myself switching to Bing when Google search refuses to find a result I like, and sometimes it works.
I have has so many Bing searches that return truly stupid results.The first result for the query "Steam" is the Wikipedia page for the Steam game service. Chances are that the result I wanted was store.steampowered.com. I would have forgiven it for the first result being the Wikipedia page for the vapour form of water, but seriously, why would I want the Wikipedia page about Steam?
If you want measure success rate based on clicks, you have to make a standarized test where 1) you make sure that the questions are not answered in the preview text already. Examples include unit conversion, weather report, money conversion, etc (e.g. 100 USD in EUR). 2) more importantly, the questions AND the people doing the search are the same, or at least very similar, for both engines. The reason why this is important is that if you put some stupid idiot to do a search, it is possible that after searching for "candy" and getting a result like "free chandy! click here! not a scam!" he would click (of course it is also posible that, that the search terms he enters is not too smart, thus not leading to a good result).
Google's new search results for Tablets, is awful. It has made their results MUCH less usable. The change has driven me to Bing, which I hadn't used before.
I find Bing, on my ipad, much more usable and see little difference from what Google used to offer.
On my desk top I still tend to use Google as it presents the search results in a better format (for me). I see little difference in the quality of the results.
Spam might be too strong a word. On a daily basis I work on 5, 6, or more computers (servers, PCs, other people's laptops, etc.). Inevitably, this is the default setting on all of them.
On further reflection, what I was referring to was around the time they introduced instant they also introduced that magnifying glass thing which is what makes me crazy. I'm one of those people that tracks what I'm reading on the screen with a mouse. I find myself constantly X'ing out of those previews.
Mind you, I've used Google since it was small, for what, 10 or 12 years? I remember back in college the first time I used it. I literally remember the guy that told me about it, the room we were standing in, and the the first time I used it. The *reason* we started using it (my geek friends and I) was that it was simple in design, didn't have ads, and was fast and relevant. It seems less so today.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
"Showing results for "unted states weather ra"
That's just their AJAX unable to keep up with your typing. It registers the \n before it finishes registering the last few characters of your query.
It happens a lot to me. I don't use the search form on the page anymore. Instead, I use the search box in Firefox.
Google's taken a wrong turn in its user interface. It's one thing to include results from other relevant features in the search results itself, but a completely other thing to lay out all of their services all over their page (top and side) even when they're completely irrelevant to your current search. It needs to go back to the clean, uncluttered look and feel it used to have. Otherwise, people will (and I imagine already have) start looking for alternatives.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
When the user gets useful organic search results leading directly to a useful site, the search engine makes nothing. When the search ads are more relevant than the top organic results, the user is likely to click on an ad, making the search engine some money. If some of the top-results are from ad-heavy content farms, leading the user on a detour through made-for-Adsense pages, the search engine profits. Some commentators have said that Google results are "just bad enough" to keep users coming back while driving traffic to the ads.
Then there are ads on third-party pages, what Google calls "AdSense". This is the business that used to be called "DoubleClick", which Google bought in 2007. Bing has a quality advantage here, because they have no incentive to send traffic to Adsense pages. (Microsoft is considering a "publisher" program of their own, but so far it's just in test. Adsense is 30% of Google's revenue.)
This is a fundamental conflict in the search engine business, creating tension between the "editorial" side of the company and the advertising side. Google is nowhere near as tough on spam as it could be. Google Adsense funds most of the dreck on the web. Google does not seem to favor AdSense heavy-sites (SEO metrics people watch this closely), but they don't disfavor them, either. Compare Blekko, which takes a hard line on spam, blocking all the major content farms.
That may be why Bing scores higher in Experian's metric.
Mod parent up. Notice the fifth link on Bing: "Can Openoffice.org rival Microsoft with Libre Office?". I am no Microsoft hater, actually quite the contrary, but that link is not there on the first page of Google, and rightfully so.
Our standard desktops are so locked down that unless you explicitly enter www.google... every search is directed to bling.
We can't even run non permitted apps and this includes Chrome and Firefox, even the standalone versions.
I'm also convinced that there is a local dns redirect for google.com that goes to MS.
Why? Our IS dept is made up of Brainwashed Microsofties. MS this, MS that, all hail the great god MS.
Thankfully my job requires that I be able to run 'other applications' so I have in effect a jailbroken PC.
Still I have to hack the registry every so often as some twat keeps removing my local admin privs with an AD policy.
Back to Bing.
Frankly, it feels like going back to what it was like using Google the year 2000 in terms of the relevance of the first page of hits. There is so much advertising crap that sometimes I use my own laptop and search using FFox with Adblock & Noscript. Luckily the WiFi LAN is not locked down like the wired one.
Oh, we are on a hopelessly out of have version of IE7. IE8 is at least a year away.
Still I'll probably be out on my ear in the next round of layoffs. I'll take the money and call it a day and retire. I'm past caring now.
Take define, or movies, or calculator, for example. What a surprise, Bing offers instant answers for pretty much all the queries google does, and more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing#Instant_answers
Since that's the case, the numbers of those searches most likely cancel out, and the usage of clickthrough can still be a reasonable metric.
Google's got you covered: http://www.google.com/landing/recipes/
It appears it has been changed so you have to click on the magnifying glass to get the preview, rather than just mouse-over. Actually, once you click on one magnifying glass, you then just have to move the mouse to get other previews, until you X out.
"The market watcher defines 'success rate' as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website" - that seems odd to me: 32.44% google searches aren't followed up by going to a resulting web site? I guess sometimes I have to rephrase my query, which I guess would contribute to that 32.44%, and I suppose once in a while I get to the second page of search results (but still ultimately visit a resulting page), or get interrupted, but I can't think of any instances whereby I concluded the information doesn't exist and gave up...
The computer shop I work at has listings on both Google and Bing. We don't do any heavy SEO or manipulation, we're just out there. Google Places has us in the top 3. Bing Local? At the last spot, on the last page. That wouldn't bother me so much, except I'm searching for "computer repair, (my city), (my state)". Bing has pages and pages of rental companies, computer dealers, and completely unrelated companies before our company.
I typically can find exactly what I am looking for on Google's first page _without_ having to click anything. Contrast that with my ms-and-Bing-using parents who trust the search results and _begin_ at result #1.
That is only a "success" if your purpose is to generate revenue bearing clicks, not necessarily that the user successfully found what he was looking for.
If only there was a Google-type search that paid attention to letter case and special characters....
Bing results for me are not good at all, in my opinion. Even when I try to search for something on Microsoft's website using their Bing supported search, I've always resorted back to using Google to find the links on Microsoft's site that I need.
But Google doesn't seem to be as good as it once was. Whatever happened to their effort to get rid of junk sites?
Agreed. Google isn't innocent either. As you probably know, as of FF version 5 have stopped supporting/making the Google Toolbar for FF (https://www.google.com/intl/en/toolbar/ff/index.html).
This sucks because it was one of the things that kept me using Google. The biggest thing for me is how you could open searches in a new tab. A small, but important feature to me. Now, as far as I can tell, the only browser that you can easily have this feature on is IE. I use FF now, but I constantly miss the toolbar.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Here's a real scenario: I searched for "united states weather radar". Google returned "Showing results for "unted states weather ra". Search instead for "united states weather radar". Who searches for "weather ra"??
I'm going to have to mark this one "Cannot reproduce".
Yes, I find that Google makes corrections to my queries, but more often than not it's when I'm intentionally searching for something that is misspelled (e.g. a band name), a foreign-language word or phrase, or is otherwise an unusual permutation of words. When I didn't want the correction to happen, it's frustrating, but I think more often than not it improves my results (you don't think about the times where it helped you, but rather the comparatively few times where it got something wrong). Anyhow, one trick that everybody should know is if you want a term matched exactly in the results, put a + sign before it (this is particularly useful when intentionally misspelling a word). This will prevent any correction, reformulation, or expansion that Google might otherwise do on a term.
Maybe Bing isn't too bad for web searches (I say it is crap), but my experiences with Bing for maps have been nothing short of hilarious. Recently I was planning a road trip from Northern Ohio to New Hampshire and decided to try Bing for directions and maps. I guess MS really didn't want me to stop off in Bath,NY, in the finger lakes region in Western New York. Any search including the town's name, or attempts to route through it, left me with crazy directions to bathrooms and linen stores in New York City. I played around with it a little bit and found no way to fix the results. Scrolling around on the map, you can find Bath, but Bing otherwise does not acknowledge the possibility that you might want to go there. Back to Google Maps I guess, even though it had me get off the Interstate for no reason at one point, take some tiny little country highway for 20 miles, then get back on the interstate. At least I can figure out how to ignore Google's stupidity, while Bing's goes above and beyond all expectations. This was just the best example of several odd ones.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Actually I'm interested in the bing link to softonic.com. Is this a legitimate file dump, or is it one of those sites that bundles crudware with genuine free software? Anybody with experience on this one here?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is not a legitimate excuse for cheating.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That the construction of this "analysis" is without merit in terms of its conclusion "Bing more effective than Google" goes directly to the point. It means that the analysis is flawed in its premise, misleading, and probably deliberately so. Which then leads one to examine the motive for misleading research. For this, we usually don't have to go further than this lengthy treatise on the subject.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Then I would pay for Google. But not Bing. Asking around I get a pretty uniform consensus on this. Google is worth paying for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What about all the people who quickly Google a word to check spelling? Or other information that can be learned without clicking any links? This is just another use of statistics to make Microsoft/Bing appear to be gaining on Google.
Experian isn't a company I would believe any more than Phorm or NebuAd.
Bing corrupts search results. Search for anything M$ considers negative to their image, and you get Why M$ is better than" pages as the first page of results! Same with Yahoo search less than 24 hours after it was aquired bt M$.
If they corrupt search results this way, what other ways are they corrupting the search results?
You could also cure cancer.
But you just post on slashdot.
You're awesome.
I have all forms of instant searches and auto-suggestions disabled. But that's not because I type so fast. It's because when I search for a sextant I don't want to be given a ton of links about sex. There could be other NSFW fragments too, and I don't want any of them hitting the cache. I search only when I'm done typing.
Where I work you can disable instant search but the next time you start the PC it will be re-enabled, it wouldn't be so bad but the search default gets reset to google as well. I've given up on google search since instant search is so slow and finiky.
parent is M$ fanboi troll or paid M$ staff
either way parent comment is irrelevant to the issue of the article as it is obviously biased severly
Thank you Dave Raggett
... than Bing or Yahoo users, who will just click on anything, apparently. The Yahoo thing clinches it.
They start saying 'we got 80.34%, they got 67%, so we're better' stuff. We want qualitative arguments that are clear and succinct. I you don't have one, you don't have a point and what you are saying is therefore pointless, so why bother? With that, I move on. Google works for me and Bing doesn't, so for me that is a 100% effectiveness for Google and a 0% effectiveness for Bing, which roughly corresponds to my actual usage pattern, so the 'vote with your feet' economic model works well in this case. When will marketroids get it that 'measurably better' is a silly idea because there is no standard of measure!
John_Chalisque
Guy obviously had a virus. Because bing can't find shit for me and google is always on point
"Experian Hitwise claims Bing and Bing-powered search to be more effective than Google. The success rate for Bing searches in the U.S. in July was 80.04%, compared to 67.56% for Google. The market watcher defines 'success rate' as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website"
Where do they get their raw data from. Do they provide any reasons for this 'success rate' and wouldn't a more accurate results be a purchase made because of a click-through search.
" Experian and Microsoft Advertising reveal how they are helping brands connect with their ideal audiences in a multi-channel world"
Since I don't give blanket scripting access to google.com, gstatic, etc, now that google uses instant it often happens that I try to search on google and get no results because the site is broken without either all or no scripting enabled. Whenever this happens it reminds me to search on Bing instead.
The results on Bing are fine for the most part, and I like how they improved the search UI over the old Google (most of which Google copied, Google just went too far and made their copy over the top).
a.k.a. James Plamondon's "Technical Evangelists" have been busy astroturfing sites that have been posting MS PR Memos. I wonder how many journalists are now the proud owners of expensive laptops from Microsoft after posting favorable Bing articles?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Actually, Google has a gigantic blacklist of fragments that when they are detected, immediately cancel Instant and display the message "Press enter to search". Sex is one of those, including virtually every other NSFW fragment out there. Just try it sometime - enable Instant and type "sex" into the bar. It will not display results.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Because in my case, Google has the extremely annoying habit around 30%+ of the time of changing my search query to something largely unrelated. And even when it doesn't say "Searching for XXX. Click here to search for YYY", 90% of the time it pretends words in my search query aren't actually relevant. It's a rare query where I don't have to make multiple goes at it, trying to figure out how to make Google actually take notice of the parts of the query that are actually important.
Put a + in front of the words that it keeps ignoring. The + tells it that the keyword is mandatory and you only want pages that actually contain it.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
experian is a microsoft gold certified partner. i am sure we can expect
plenty of unbiased reporting.
The definition of success-rate is not user-centric.
'The market watcher defines "success rate" as the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website.'
How do we know this matches what a user finds interesting? As someone mentioned, typically with Google you don't even need to go to a website, the answer you're looking for is already shown in the search results. That may not sit well with the website owner, and this study is clearly measuring success from the perspective from the website owner.
But who cares about that when you want to find something? Clearly the users are voting with their feet.
Another interesting thing: what if, after a Google search, you're happy with the first search result. That's one hit. But if you go to Bing, say the first result is not relevant and you need to visit the first 5 links. Will that make Bing 5 times as "successful"?
Certainly from the perspective of the website owner or advertiser, but surely not from the user.
So I don't think the way Experian Hitwise measures has a lot of bearing on "success" from the perspective of a user. And that is what makes things popular, not whether it satisfies the advertiser.
I sometimes use google to calculate something for me, like sqrt(2*(4 electron volts)/(3 AMU)). I don't care about the matches. Google has succeeded for me.
Or, I use google to define: something. I don't need to visit a website, because google gives me the answer.
Also, google gives me excepts for each of the matches. Sometimes this will answer my question, without needing to visit the website. How is that a failure?
Someone must be hanging some large monetary candy in front of Experian for them to publish such a bogus article. No follow thru thought seems to have been in action. I agree with other comments that 1: not clicking can sometimes be a sucess. How much time do I want to waste sifting thru useless info. The cull rate should be part of the equations. 2: Sometimes the answer I'm looking for is there so I have no need to click. Lets see, I got my answer but according to Experian its a failure. The only reason I ever even use Bing is because MS obfuscates implementing of google as the primary search instead of Bing. I wish one day MS would rely on quality of product rather than brute force to get market share. IE, Bing, Office to name a few examples. Some you literally can't get rid of, some its a total PITA to do so and some just take forever, i.e. removing Office, ugh.
Just try it sometime - enable Instant and type "sex" into the bar. It will not display results.
OK, I did that. Typed 'sex', did NOT press Enter or click anything, and within 0.5 second got an ad for 'naughty local girls' along with a full page of sex-related stuff. Proceeded to type 'tant' and got what I needed in the first place.
Typed 'kill' and got suggestions and search done on that. Proceeded to type 'een' and got the stuff about the city in Texas.
This experiment failed to reveal a filter. I was not logged in and I was using standard, default settings. The browser was IE9. Besides, I doubt very much that Google would know all NSFW fragments of all languages on Earth, in all encodings.
One of concerns is that the cache of your browser will be searched and used against you if something happens.
We aren't yet at the stage when your searches can trigger the police response, but it's getting there. There is no need to make "the man's" job easier. As had been said by a competent specialist: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." That part hasn't changed.
At work your searches go through the corporate filter; we had one at the last place (a big company) that I worked at. The whole 'sex' page would be blocked by that filter, with logs and all. How would you prove to your boss that your search was innocent? The filter has no reason to log traffic that it doesn't block, so your search of 'sextant' a second later won't be logged.
As I see it, instant search doesn't help (at least me) to get results faster. It only helps Google to claim 10x more searches done. In reality, most of the intermediate searches are a waste of resources. For example, all intermediate searches in "internal combustion engine in prius" are useless until the last word is entered. It doesn't help that one of suggestions after "internal" is "internal hemorroids."
This has a direct analogy IRL. A few people like to reply to someone's speech before the speaker finishes. It is rarely welcome or productive. Humanity worked out a simple protocol: listen to the complete statement, think about it, voice your answer. Google here tries to answer before you are done asking. When it's not pointless it is simply distracting; sometimes it is also disturbing, disgusting or otherwise unwelcome (and unrelated to your query.)
The algorithm changes google has been doing in the past year have not been all that successful. While this particular quality of measurement is perhaps flawed, statistics are never great for anything more than trends anyhow. There is only a percentage of search queries that could be answered without clicking on a link. I would say I have maybe one or two such queries a day of that nature, more if I am away from a computer and using my phone for that kind of thing. So I'm not sure how much that would skew the results, but I wouldn't guess by more than a few results. And there are queries other search engines can answer in one return as wll. (Plus you can't easily measure in volume this kind of searching).
Another thing to consider is how much google is personalizing now. It's something they always have done some of, but have noticably ramped up their efforts on that front, for good or ill.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next year or two. Any search engine that gains market share is a good thing, it's really bad for all of your eggs to be in one basket. When google changes things just a bit it could take you from being a successful growing website to the bottom of the barrel.
Zget sounds like a MS liaison, maybe a couple circles of indirection away from being an employee.
He had his big First Post up really fast aka it was prepped either when he saw the article coming through the pipeline or pulled from his supplies of prewritten info.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hallo.
I believe you mentioned this before too, so (for reasons I could not place an hour ago) I checked the timing and I noticed the turbo-post too. I mirrored your sentiment above.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
W hy
Wh ere
Wha les
What ever
What d elights
What do bluebirds sing
What do y yellow canaries eat
Instant For The Loss!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My use of bing have had 100% success rate... I write firefox and it gave me a link so I could install firefox on my newly installed win7 machine.
Since then I have not used it... But giving that I probably count in that statistic as one-seach one-click == 100%
A good portion of my Google searches are nothing more than cheap easy spell checking so there is no need to click on any links. Of course I always find what I'm looking for on Bing, the only search I ever do on that site is "Google"
if you use bing from linux, it only returns links to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247804
along with a sprinkling of russian porno sites
Hmmmm..... Let me guess.... It was a study funded by MS.... Bing is a POS - as is everything MS puts out... No thanks...
This is pretty amusing, considering google gets its searches rated by real people. Probably something to do with the fact that with google you dont need to visit a webpage in many cases to get your answer.
I went back to Yahoo a few weeks ago for my main searches. Cant say why, still bounce stuff off Google occasionally. Just don't seem to like it anymore. If I could say one thing to the Google search algorithm pgmers it would be, Please just return the data. Stop trying to guess what you think I want.
Try searching for Mars Explorer from inside the grade school system network. ;)
Google, Yahoo, and bing all have different kinds of crowds. Google has a more experienced crowd that will look for way more obscure things than your average person using internet explorer and searching on bing or a person that is just used to yahoo.
You're not going to be searching for "cheesy hilarity sticks" on bing.
a
asian ass master
I do not like Bing because it is from Microsoft. They might be doing OK in this search market if you pick your metrics carefully. However, I dont like them simply because Bing is from Microsoft. I do make my living dealing with their software all day long. I am not a Unix bigot. Dont even know how to use Unix.
Is there a tutorial or something out there that explains all this? I've always wanted to find one but never been able to. Y'know, trying to do a search on how to search doesn't really work very well...
This could merely mean that Bing users are more likely than Google users to click on crap.
TM
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I mean, I don't use Google only to get to pages. Sometimes I search Google for words just to see if I've written them well, or to get a definition, or to know the weather, and even more often as a calculator or currency exchange table. Did the study account for those? I don't remember the last time I had to look in the second page of Google results to find what I wanted.
A lot of times I will google something that will appear in the google search summary. No need to go to the website. This happens much more than I even care to admit. Maybe I forgot how to spell something or wanted to know of the new movie that that one guy is in. Both would make me do a search and not click on the site.
Ok, my apologies - it appears the word sex itself isn't on the blacklist. But almost any word following it is. See http://www.2600.com/googleblacklist/ for an interesting list. (Note: don't do it from work, your corporate filter will not be impressed).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
for "blowjob". the first find on both led to a free video without multiple redirects. the bing offering was more enthusiastic.
A user clicking a link after searching shouldn't necessarily be the only way to success, at least for Google (I've never used Bing). Lots of the time I use Google my searches resemble "convert 1452.53 pounds to slugs" and I don't click on anything since Google displays the result at the top. I use this for all sorts of things, like "us time," or "Thanksgiving 2011." I can't be the only one. They need a better metric if they're going to make these claims.
It is interesting to note that since *this* article was posted, people have spread the topic around so many forums that google is now unable to decide between it being a "shaft" reference, and merely a common question posted to message forums.
in other words, by observing the behavior of google, google has changed its behavior.
bing and wolfram seem unaffected. bing still being clueless, and wolfram still saying it's shaft.