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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."
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.
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.
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More to the point, just because someone doesn't click, doesn't mean it wasn't a success. Google manages to answer a lot of my queries without ever needing to click a link... If I search for "define: bum nuggets" or "234GBP in EUR" I don't click any links.
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.
Since when does Google have a service to download Microsoft service packs?
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.
Google also filters on link farms. Of course their filtering isn't perfect, but it would surprise me a lot if Microsoft had discovered the magic algorithm to get rid of all "search engine optimization" gaming, and it's simply wrong to say that Google "counts all kinds of links".
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.
One of my main issues with bing has nothing to do with complex search algorithms. Just search for e.g. shoes. The first page of results already contains two sets of duplicate results in my case: www.shoes.com and www.shoes.com/womens (sic, it actually stands for "women's"), and www.shoes.be and www.shoes.be/schoenwinkels.asp?l=k.
I get this with virtually every search term I've ever tried on Bing, which means that there are much less individually useful results than on Google (which will group all similar results from the same domain and then let you move on).
PS: yes, this is the first time in my life I've searched for the term "shoes" on the Internet
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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.
Try it on Wolfram Alpha. Google and Bing both got shafted.