Bing Versus Google

Which is Better: Bing or Google?

If you look at the raw numbers, Google is still the king of online search by a wide margin. Recent figures show that over 69 per cent of searches are conducted via Google.com, versus about 30 per cent for Microsoft's Bing.com and its partner, Yahoo.com. But that lead has been dropping slowly, albeit by tenths of a percentage point year to year. Is it time to consider Bing a serious alternative to Google?

From the perspective of someone conducting a search, "better" results means things that more closely match what you really had in mind when you entered your search terms. If you're searching for information about "American Girls" you probably want dolls, not chicks in patriotic bikinis. But how can researchers measure whether people are finding what they're searching for?

One test of a "successful search" used by research firm Experion Hitwise is whether a user clicks through to a Web site displayed in the results of his search. It's plausible that a click means you found something close to what you were looking for. On this metric, Google had a 65.57 per cent success rate in December, 2010, while Bing scored over 81 per cent. Does that make Bing better than Google?

A more subjective approach to comparing the quality of search results involves constructing complex search strings that test how well a search engine's algorithms "understand" what you are looking for. Conrad Saam of SearchEngineLand.com did just that with 20 search terms run on Google and Bing. He found that Bing was better than Google at understanding that he wanted the "Attorney Tom Brady" and not the football player, for example.

Relevancy and Other Factors

The relevancy of search results is a big issue with searchers, and Google seems to be suffering in that department. A ton of low-quality "content farms" churn out Web pages full of gibberish that is peppered with high-paying Google keywords. Users don't gain much, if anything, from reading such content. Bing and Yahoo!, with much lower search market share, are not targeted by content farms to the same extent that Google is. So perhaps Bing's results tend to be more relevant for that reason.

One big difference between Google and Bing is that Google tries to make available cached copies of the Web pages it indexes, while Bing does not. If you want to read a page that has been deleted from its original site, Google's cached copy may be your only hope.

Another Google feature that Bing lacks is the ability to show results by date. Often I'll do a Google search, then click the "Latest" link to show the most recent news on a topic. But you can also ask for results within a specific day, week, month or year range. And if you click the "More search tools" link, you'll find some pretty nifty stuff, such as the Wonder Wheel, Related Searches, and Timeline.

Which search engine produces "better" results is a question that probably has no definitive answer. It probably depends on your personality, and the things you are most likely searching for. My advice: If you've never tried Bing, give it a test drive for a few days. Then pick one as your preferred search engine, and if you're not satisfied with the results of a search, try it with the other one.

Do you have something to say about the relative merits of Bing and Google? Post your comment or question below...