A Comparison of two Search Engines – Google vs. Bing
What an irony – even for searching facts and figures for comparing the popular Google search engine, with that of an upcoming one from Microsoft, the Bing, I had invariably typed on Google “Bing versus Google” and not on Bing. Habits die hard.
Microsoft has recently unfurled a new and attractive alternative to Google search engine. And people want the two compared for performance appraisal.
Almost the usual thing happening is your web browser may contain Google’s Search box prominently on top. And yes of course Google is thorough in tendering search results in micro seconds with such a great speed.
To compare Bing, Microsoft’s new prop up just a month ago, although it is very impressive, with a Live Search Engine like Google would be – comparing two champions in two different leagues, unfairly.
On aesthetics, Bing seems best than Google. The Google Search button is prominent in otherwise clean and sparse Google Home page and links for videos, images, news, shopping, maps, Gmail and a lot more.
In contrast, the Homepage of Bing attracts with breathtaking travel related photographs being pasted daily. One day on this week, an amazing image of Mexico’s manta rays appeared at Bing homepage, with a beautiful description when your mouse crawled over the image “These curious creatures are gentle, sociable and playful”. And what fun these brief digressions make! Actually Bing offers facility to click on images to take you to shopping, videos, news, travel and maps.
Thinking of searches made in search engines like Google, there is more to it rather than a wild manta chase and you want comprehensive, relevant and also fast results. On this aspect, Microsoft holds its grounds more, particularly in the fields Bing is concentrating initially – health; travel; shopping and finding local businesses. What is more, you get on certain items a cash-back program when you buy through Bing.com.
For example if you type “New York Mets” on Bing, it shows on top of its results – most recent scores of the team and upcoming schedules – whereas Google will only display the score of their last game and when the next game will be played.
Similarly if you type a company name in Bing, what you get is the telephone number of the company’s customer service, which you can hardly get through Google.
Another charm of Bing search engine experience is, when you make a search you get the right snippets of only the information you want and not more leads. On moving the cursor to the right of the search result tendered by Bing, there appears a window containing excerpts derived from the site underlying it. This will enable you decide instantly whether or not to go into the full site.
Videos like YouTube, Hulu etc. start playing at once, when you crawl over a video thumb nail with your cursor and there is no need to click “play”. And you will watch the video in a larger window, when you click the thumbnail, not necessarily leaving Bing.com. Also hovering on an image will show the same to you in a larger window.
There is one more plus – on the down left side “the quick tabs” appear on the results pane and assist you in refining a search. Simply when you enter “Charleston, South Carolina”, category-wise results are shown – restaurants; hotels; real estate; local weather and so on. For the same thing on Google, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and see “related searches”, although you have the choice to a side panel “show options”.
In real-time searches also Bing excels. For instance, when you make a search for a celebrity such as “Al Gore Twitter” adding Twitter to your search – you are able to get a full list of their recent tweets.
Following is the illustration as how Google and Bing fared on some sample searches:
Cataracts: Bing search engine showed at the top of the search results, a full description of this eye condition, taken out of a Mayo Clinic article. It was an advertisement sponsored by a lens manufacturer Transition, showed at Google at its top result. But both Bing and Google showed many relevant listings from same sources though. Google showed 3.3 million search results, whereas it was nearly 2.3 million in Bing.
Hilton, Paris: When searched with an intentionally vague query, Google results had a sponsored listing for Hilton.com as the starter and followed it with a news result for the socialite. For Bing it was hotelreservations.com at the top, followed by the site of The Hotels by Hilton and the “official” website of Paris Hilton.
Travel is Bing’s forte and if you click “Travel” you get a site resembling Expedia, where you can further search for hotels, flights, cars etc. Another help from Bing is its prediction about airfares and their fall or rise for certain cities, whereby you can decide whether to buy the ticket now or later.
Michael Jackson: For this search of the legendry Pop King, both Google and Bing tendered news stories about him first. Google linked first to Wikipedia entry for Michael Jackson and led to his official site – michaelackson.com over images and videos about him. All other related searches of jokes, songs, kids not his, came at the bottom. On Bing search, similar sites were listed but putting images and videos higher up. The pane on the left of this Michael Jackson search enable me to narrow my search by songs, news, downloads, biography, merchandise and so on. It was only 85 million search results at Google, whereas it was 101 million at Bing.
Ford Fusion: When searched for this automobile, it was Bing that got relevant statistics at the top – user ratings, fuel economy, and price range. More help was available in the side panel for categories of reviews, dealers, manual, forum, recalls as also images. Google needs poking around a bit to get these details.
Accurate searches can be Google’s strength but Bing is for more elaborate and relevant searches readily.
Summing Up the Comparison:
Google = www.google.com – Gets two stars out of four.
Pros: Comprehensive and fast in searches that seldom go wrong.
Cons: Some search tools which are powerful are shadowed.
Microsoft Bing = www.bing.com – Gets two stars out of four.
Pros: Functioning is attractive to give voluminous information instantly, with no need to look elsewhere. Excels on resources of travels and plays videos within Bing.com site. Presentation of related searches is good and additional attraction is cash-back discount program for shopping through its links.
Cons: On some particular searches, not as exhaustive as Google and not strong on news items. Video glitches are experienced occasionally.
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