Living with Google and Bing

from JoeUser Forums

imageIn my first impressions of Google vs. Bing, I outlined how both services felt in terms of quickie head to head.

Since then, I’ve had time to use both services at length and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you want to know specific facts like the capital of Australia or the population of Germany or information on a particular person, Bing has an edge. But in terms of getting to raw information quickly, Google wins by quite a bit.  That is, if I’m actually searching to accumulate knowledge on a particular subject, Google is significantly better.

So why is that?

Well, first, I think that Google does a lot better in thwarting cheese tactics some use to get higher search rankings.  So spammers and merchants that purposely link to a particular article on one of their sites from multiple domains will tend to do better on Bing than Google.

Secondly, it just seems like Google has a lot more “stuff” in its archives. Its spiders seem to be indexing a lot more than Bing’s spiders and of course, Google’s been doing it a lot longer so it tends to have in its archives things that are no longer actively linked to.

I wish I could combine the two together.  Though, until Bing gets rid of the tacky wallpaper background it uses, I will probably stick with Google as my main search engine even if everything else is equal.

19,582 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

If Copernic (not to be confused with the desktop gimmick) hadn't been bought by Microsoft maybe search engines would have evolved beyond the point & mark systems we're stuck with. Call it the cumulative edge by hits or misses, still is a stunt of details versus accuracy.

Similar paging links never solved the needs for "exact" rapidity or adaptative intuition based on users' trackout. According to qualitative aims, even a calibrated snoop on surfing records never could detect someone's intent (even Facebook monitors our interests through keywords & profiling, btw) but that has to do with amounts & variety rather than pure data keeping - be it relevant or right.

The problem is not search bars, it's what pops "in-between" multiple results or the correctly found destination(s).

Mop up the web of bots and you'd still get self-replicating correspondance complex enough to fail at precision.

Specialty might do the trick as WikiPedia (and alumnis) proved - somehow.

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Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top

I really don't think Bing can hold a candle to Google. I've used both and prefer Google.

Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top

URL to remove the bing wallpaper: http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

:)

Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top

A feature of Bing I *do* like (and one I've loved in SharePoint for years) is the abilitly to set up a search as a RSS feed.  THat way if I want to do a daily search on some topic, I can go to my iGoogle page and see a realtime search result from bing.  :)

For example: http://www.bing.com/search?q=elemental=stardock&go=&qb=1&format=rss

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top

I actually like the background image, if you mouse around it gives you interesting information :)

Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Quoting Zubaz, reply 4
URL to remove the bing wallpaper: http://www.bing.com/?rb=0


End of Zubaz's quote

Hey, I'm glad you posted that link. Some people really do like bing better without the background image. I have to agree with daedalao though, I enjoy seeing a different pic everyday.

So if you do want to check out bing without the image, go for it. I just wanted to make sure that you all had the link to turn it back on if you wanted to.  It is: http://www.bing.com/?rb=1

Cheers,

Nate

A member of the Bing Outreach Team.