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."

Comments

Re:Bing vs. Google

[jhoegl]

Well, that is interesting because I often find what I need on the first page of Google searches, sometimes second page if it is an odd issue I am working with.

This of course is related to the fact that I use 0% of Bing searches.

What? The information I provided is just as relevant as the unsupported article or reply regarding these two.

Independent statistics are required, otherwise its a he said she said scenario.

But did they found what they were looking for?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Just become somebody clicks through to the site doesn't mean the search result was a success.

Re:But did they found what they were looking for?

[thegarbz]

The queries where Google provides a direct answer probably wasn't included, but quite often the information is there right in the summary of results. When you search for something in a sentence typically the results are displayed in a summary.

For instance I want to know how many leap seconds have been applied to UTC, and I search for "current leap seconds". Google doesn't provide an instant answer. Surely I could click any one of the first 5 links and get the answer too. However I don't need to, the 6th link has this in the summary:
"31 Dec 2008 – There will NOT be a leap second introduced into UTC on that date. The current number of leap seconds is 15. The future number of leap ..."

Sorted with no click through required.

Re:Bing vs. Google

[Bert64]

There is also the advantage of small marketshare...
You have all the spammers out there trying their best to game google, but how many of them bother to try gaming bing or some of the other small engines? Same thing happened in the early days of google, altavista was full of spam while google had clean results.

Re:In my experience it depends on what you want

[Bert64]

Google track you, and if you search for geeky things regularly then it will learn thats what you are usually looking for and deliver relevant results.
If you use a completely clean browser, from an IP you've not used before, you will get different results...

Re:Bing vs. Google

[improfane]

I have been suspicious of your high ID and first postings.

I call shill. (If you don't believe me, look at his past posts.)

Re:Bing vs. Google

[Runaway1956]

The real question here is, 'How much did Microsoft pay for this predetermined study to be completed?'

Re:Arbitrary

[mcgrew]

This has practically nothing to do with "success rate"

It depends on whose success you're talking about. Bing is more successful for site owners, Google is more successful for the person searching.

Re:Bing vs. Google

[sortius_nod]

I think the bigger problem you highlight is that most people lack the capacity to actually formulate search terms. It seems that if you want to ask your search engine a question, Bing is better, if you want to actually formulate & refine your search, Google is better.

The article just seems like a bit of astroturfing crap to me, it explains nothing and bases itself on a very vague premise.