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Bing vs. Google
- corin_ 14y agoMaybe I was imagining it, but four out of the five I did I felt I knew which was Google and which was Bing - not from doing searches that I would recognise, but just from the extra non-search information / lay-out. I did my best to still pick without bias to my current search engine (Google) but ended up picking them 5/5 and Bing 0 times.
- dspig 14y agoSame here - ignoring that I could sometimes tell which one was Google and just looking at the returned links, Google won by 4 and a draw.
- quandrum 14y agoThe site breadcrumbs using ">" always give away Google unfortunately.
- addandsubtract 14y agoSo does the lighter blue of the bing links.
- Evbn 14y agoAnd the collection of similar pages when the result is a forum.
- joelrunyon 14y agoDitto. The layout of the two's result pages are so different now, it's quite easy to tell them apart.
- michaelcampbell 14y agoThe very fact that this site exist says something. To me there's a weird feeling of desperation about it.
- jabits 14y agoThere is nothing "weird" about blind "taste" tests. It's a good way to attempt to filter out at least a little bias, and here you have two competing products that do the same thing (unless your baseline assumption is that no one could ever compete with the current leader).
- eli 14y agoSeems like a pretty reasonable thing to do if you're the underdog even though you believe your product is better on its merits.
- corin_ 14y agoNot at all, it's an often used marketing technique, generally by an underdog (even if only a slight underdog) to try and pull in customers who would actually like their product better if they had tried it. The most famous example would be The Pepsi Challenge [1], but it happens all the time, for example AMD have done it at a few events comparing an AMD machine to a similar spec/price Intel build. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge
- Karunamon 14y agoBing seems to be a bit better at generic, broad searches (games, file extension $something, etc) and Google seems to be better at exact, specific queries (stop error 7B, RPGs announced at PAX 2012). Bing ended up winning, which shocked the hell out of me, but after trying a couple more times, I noticed that pattern.
- moondowner 14y agoAnd at the end of the day, what I need are exact/specific queries. Whether to get the job done, to get some certain information or something third.
- korr 14y agoDuckDuckGo is now a hundred times better than Google for those exact & specific queries. I was looking for some info on my truck engine, and Google sent me to sales pages for completely unrelated parts (and sometimes, entirely unrelated cars!). DDG sent me to deep in an old forum thread, where someone had posted a diagram of exactly what I was looking for.
- thomasjoulin 14y agoEvery time I see a link comparing search engines, I try them with hope, but always go back to Google. My last search confirms this : * Google https://www.google.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug https://www.google.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bu... * http://www.bing.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug&go=&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=insertobject+atindex+zero+bug&sc=0-0&sp=-1&sk= http://www.bing.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug&#... * http://duckduckgo.com/?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug http://duckduckgo.com/?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug
- korr 14y agoSo, five results at the top from StackOverflow... Why not just skip the search engine middle man and go straight to StackOverflow?
- freehunter 14y agoI ended up with a draw the two times I tried. I made the mistake of trying a Google search I had just done previously and ended up seeing the purple links, which tipped me off to which was which. Bing was the only one that gave me local and mapped results for "Chicago Loop pizza", but Google won out just as often. Bing is as good as Google on average. The problem is, when you're up against an entrenched competitor, good enough just isn't good enough.
- islon 14y agoNice try Microsoft. But if you really need to create a contest to prove your search engine is better you're probably desperate.
- eli 14y agoSure, it's a PR campaign, but it's built around proving to you the actual benefits of using the product. Seems pretty clever to me. You would rather they blanket the city in ads on bus shelters? Or give away $1,000 a day to a random Bing searcher?
- btilly 14y agoIt was clever when Pepsi did it to try to let people know that they couldn't tell the difference between pepsi and coke. Now? Obvious.
- niyazpk 14y agoThis is not a real blind test though. (Pardon me for being a web developer, but) I can tell which is which by just looking at the green colors used in the links. The green in Google results is a little bit more saturated than the one in Bing. Google results also seems to show share counts from Google+ as in: 73,352 people +1'd this
- crazypyro 14y agoI had two different runs that both ended 3-2 for Google. Even if Bing came out ahead, they seem so similar that I couldn't be bothered to retrain myself to bing stuff, instead of googling it, especially when I have gmail accounts.
- debacle 14y agoI wound up with 3/1/1 in favor of Bing. I sort of felt like I was choosing the Bing options, but Google still hasn't given me a real reason to switch. MS has definitely caught up quite a bit, though.
- jaimefjorge 14y agoThe 'pepsi challenge' of search engines? Tip: try to search for plot lines in movies such as: 'kid that is able to see people already dead'
- CodeCube 14y agoEnded up picking google 4-1. I'm somewhat of a bing fan in the sense that I find them good enough for most searches. So I was a bit surprised that the results ended up skewing in google's favor ... guess that kind of backfired for them :-P
- mtgx 14y ago5-0 in favor of Google for me. 3 of my queries had 5 words, one had 4, and one had 2. Bing is almost as good at solving the easy short ones, while Google can solve even the long queries.
- BitMastro 14y agoI got a draw and then a 5-0 for Google. A couple of result for Bing were weird, like displaying "Seattle" when I searched for "a" (the letter), NSFW images when I was searching for a novel ("accelerando"). Google knowledge graph it's just too much ahead ("age of mcgyver") and it has better results on maps and evaluating expressions.
- bugmenot 14y agoAccelerando is a relatively well-known adult manga (also made into an anime) that, IIRC, has also been around longer than cstross' novel, so NSFW images are not an unreasonable answer to that query.
- yock 14y ago3/2 in favor of Google. I was surprised by how similar the results were, and by what I apparently considered important about search results.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- taytus 14y agoGoogle 4-1. No surprises here.
- iamgopal 14y agoI tried very specific queries ( e.g. subdomain routing in webapp2 ), and its Google 5-0
- iaskwhy 14y ago4 for Google and a draw. Google is still way ahead using my mother language (which is not English).
- dagw 14y agoI found exactly the same thing. Searching in English gave me mostly draws. Searching in Swedish and Google crushed Bing at least 4-1 every time.
- brittohalloran 14y agoGoogle 4-1. Backfire
- joering2 14y agothe 2-way layout reminds me when I wanted to do the same thing, and combine search result into one (of course removing dups). Ended up with making google gui into bing results of now defunct binngle.com (due to MS charging for their api access)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tucson 14y ago1. survey is organized by Microsoft, 2. I think the survey is skewed because typically when you go there you don't have anything specific in mind to search so you type one-word query (they even propose them!) and one-word queries are hard for google
- esolyt 14y agoI did a comparison by actually searching the same phrases on google.com/ncr with Incognito. The actual Google results are much better than the Google results on this page. Search for "Hunger Games" on Google returns the IMDB page as the first result, which is exactly what I want. But neither panes on the Bing's test has the IMDB page as the first result.
- timothya 14y agoI remember a while back when Bing was shown pretty conclusively to be taking Google results. So I wonder if this test is really "Google vs. Bing + Google". EDIT: Source - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165469 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165469
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoLast time I checked, it looked like Bing was still using clicks on Google search results as a signal in Bing's rankings.
- sc0ttbeardsley 14y agoHow does msft have access to google algo click data?
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoIE and Windows, I believe.
- sc0ttbeardsley 14y agoInteresting. The privacy implications are disturbing if true. I'm neither an IE nor windows user but I suspect most users wouldn't opt-in if given that choice. Any refs to research/evidence about the topic would be appreciated.
- sc0ttbeardsley 14y agoTo answer my own question: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/02/01/thoughts-on-search-quality.aspx http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20... Seems it is opt-in users.
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoThe IE privacy policy is at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie-8/privacy-statement http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/product... . Look under the section titled "Suggested Sites." Here's the relevant section: "When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information. ... Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included. For example, if you visited the Microsoft.com search website at http://search.microsoft.com http://search.microsoft.com and entered "Seattle" as the search term, the full address http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=Seattle&qsc0=0&FORM=QBMH1&mkt=en-US http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=Seattle&qsc0=... will be sent." Most people have little idea that allowing a feature called "Suggested Sites" will result in their Google searches and clicks being sent to Microsoft, or that Microsoft will use clicks on Google search results in Bing's ranking. MSFT also uses something called the Microsoft CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program), and I think that's either opt-out already or they're making it opt-out in Windows 8--it's built into the "Use Express Settings," I believe. Again, I haven't looked at this very recently, but if you're using a recent version of Windows and IE, you're probably sending your searches and clicks to Microsoft unless you've been very careful about how you configured your computer.
- ramy_d 14y agoI would like to see "live" results to help corroborate their claim.
- ch0wn 14y ago5-0 for Google. I tried mostly programming related queries as I find the differences most noticeable there. Especially when searching for specific APIs or objects, Bing tends to give you just the project homepage and some unrelated pages, while Google gives you the actual deep link.
- AlisdairO 14y ago3-1 in favour of google for me. I suspect a lot of this may be down to how challenging the queries are that people put in. Bing's historically been great at generic searches, but I made a point of looking for more difficult stuff, where google has (for me) always been better.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoI selected one draw and then Google every other time. It was close for most searches but Google was slightly better. Google seems to be better at more detailed searches whereas Bing is better at searching for broader things (like they suggest 'wedding dress', 'chicken nuggets' etc.).
- rome 14y ago2 Draws, 1 Google 2 Bings for me.
- ecaron 14y agoAnyone else seeing different results on this vs. what Blekko's monte (e.g. http://blekko.com/ws/your+phrase+/monte http://blekko.com/ws/your+phrase+/monte) produces?
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoI did all JavaScript searches and knew which were Bing. Do a search for: array.prototype.filter. The Google result gives you MDN, the Bing result gives you MSDN.
- rogerbinns 14y agoBTW it is best to use Incognito mode. In my case Bing won 1 out 5 of the rounds. I used searches I had done recently that hadn't given satisfactory results on Google. In any event Microsoft now at least has searches it can work with and improve. I can't imagine any other way they could get Google users to provide search data.
- Sindisil 14y agoGoogle, 4 to 1. Now, all of my searches were technical; I plan to try again later with more general, "normal people" searches. Bing may do better there. Also, good results from even google searches have become harder to come by in the last year or so. I have to work harder at my search terms. I don't know if that's Sturgeon's Law at work, or if there's room for a search engine to improve enough to become better than google. Perhaps targeted search engines are the answer (i.e. engines's who have both their search and crawler algorithms tuned for a specific target audience) are the answer?
- FigBug 14y agoI went 4 to 1 google as well. My searches weren't technical, my name, my job, my hobbies, etc.
- sondh 14y agoI got 3 for Google. The results are surprisingly similar to pick a winner. Probably because I chose some easy searches (Mr. President, person name, place).
- rfergie 14y agoI did a mixture. Google won technical searches easily. Bing marginally better on the others
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ken 14y agoI've noticed this as well. The closer my searches are to what (I imagine) a typical Google employee does every day (Linux/Python/Java/HTML/HTTP/CSS, English language, American locale, someone in their 20's/30's, etc.), the better it does. Google search can be incredibly good at taking a partial Linux error message, and leading directly to a solution. The further my search is from this, the worse the results I get. I'd say this is a common theme throughout Google's software. Google Wave, for example, seemed to be aimed squarely at the "I'm a Google engineer" use case. (I assume not many Googlers ride the bus, because that's a weak point of their maps!) The Chrome commercials they're running right now are a great example: they look like something straight out of the old demoscene, that Google engineers might do in their spare time, not something that I could imagine a use for.
- kaolinite 14y agoGoogle 4, Draw 1, Bing 0. Why? Because I tested it with fairly specific queries. A while ago I tried to switch to Bing because after testing it with a few general searches, it seemed just as good. However, when I switched and started searching for compiler errors, etc - I soon switched back because the results were just nowhere near as good. Here's what I searched for: bash: !": event not found error gtk calendar tutorial python import gtk error seed funding in uk Something to remember by the way is that Google has spent a lot of time and effort on their "bubble", that is, search results personalisation (http://dontbubble.us http://dontbubble.us) and it is a big part of what makes their results so great. That influence won't be present in this test.
- wickedchicken 14y agoMuch easier to use blekko's 3-engine monte, since it strips formatting that might give away the source engine. Just add /monte at the end of a query: http://blekko.com/ws/hunger+games+/monte http://blekko.com/ws/hunger+games+/monte
- upinsmoke 14y agopicked google
- tree_of_item 14y ago>We're Sorry, Google has banned us from retrieving results from them for now
- PaulHoule 14y agothey both suck -- for 3 out 5 queries I tried they both return spammy junk or non-helpful shopping links
- madoublet 14y agoMan, I completely agree. Both Google and Bing are completely and utterly broken. Both return about.com and ask.yahoo.com and a number of other sites that have been specifically built to game the system. Does anyone else remember when you could search Google and it would return academic institutions and actual interesting blog posts from individuals? It has been a long time. When your system can be gamed, it is broken. Period.
- riyadparvez 14y agoGoogle always worked for me whatever the result is. Their default queries are just ridiculous and cherry-picked.
- riyadparvez 14y agoI've noticed, 1st result displayed on their search didn't match mine. Nice try, M$
- wcchandler 14y agoI'm the obvious exception who's skewing the average but Bing won 4-1. I found their color palette much easier on my eyes, and when half the results were "draw," I sided with Bing, simply because I would prefer the presentation of their results.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoOk, so I found it amusing that they don't include Blekko, I mean we did make this into a fun game with our three card monte game with our /monte tag in search results :-) And I suppose it doesn't really serve their interests to 'lose' to a little guy either. That said, its an interesting experiment. And at blekko.com we've been running for over a year [1]. What we've found is that there is a huge brand bias, which is to say that if you use some search engine as your primary search engine, you tend to think that is the best one regardless of whether its Blekko, Bing, or Google (or even DDG although DDG is more a search utility rather than a search engine as it doesn't have its own web index). But 'quality' is also a very subjective thing as well. So if you search for highly SEO'd categories you will find the Blekko and Bing do better than Google mostly because there is a curated input (in Blekko's case it was from day one with it's from slashtags and in Bing's they started doing outsourced curation (putatively after seeing how effective it is in Blekko :-) in some topics with their 'editors' program [2]) At some point Google will realize what Bing and Blekko have which are that the 'indexing the web' problem became the 'filtering the web' problem when the signal to noise ratio started decreasing in about 2005, and that the only viable weapon at the moment for human on human spamming (this is where real humans are working for 5 cents a page to write web pages that draw hits) is human judgement. If the Bing guys are reading (and I know you are) why not open up your challenge to the new kid on the block, we don't just do Blekko vs Google in our monte results :-) [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-blekkos-3-engine-monte/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-blekkos-3-en... [2] http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/11/14/introducing-bing-editors-picks-a-guide-to-great-sites.aspx http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...
- pilgrim689 14y ago"so I found it amusing that they don't include Blekko" Just took a look at Blekko. It looks good, but you can't honestly believe the layman cares as much about it as he does about search engines coming out of MS or Google. Does the layman (MS' target audience here) even know about Blekko?
- calinet6 14y agoHonestly I'm not even a layman; I use DuckDuckGo and Google and read HN (obvs), but I've never even heard of Blekko. Looks nice, but I completely agree: it's a little disingenuous (or perhaps tunnel-visioned) for him to believe that people really know about it.
- scottw 14y agoGiven the results of this group (I was 3 for google, 2 draw), I wonder if Google simply has a stronger technical bias than Bing.
- hk__2 14y agoThe study results are not very accurate. They made it with only 1000 US random users, and ~60% chose Bing more often, ~30% chose Google more often (on 10 queries). See the following fictive example: 1000 people, 600 have the following score: 4 Bing, 3 Google, 3 Draw; 400 have the following score: 10 Google. So, in my example, 60% of the people chose Bing more often and 40% chose Google more often. But, if you look at queries numbers, Google was chosen for 3600+10400=5800 queries, and Bing for 4*600=2400 queries, that's a 2:1 ratio, but in favor of Google.
- hk__2 14y agooops, the two '*' characters were interpreted as Markdown. So, the operation is “3×600+10×400=5800”.
- prezjordan 14y agoGoogle 4, Draw 1. Did not pick Bing results once. Methinks their "blind trial" only applies to queries Microsoft specifically gave the testers to make Bing results shine.
- boombasket 14y ago5-0 for Google. This was made by Microsoft??
- ajays 14y agoGoogle 5-0 Google's strength is not in searching for head or torso terms like "facebook" or "2013 calendar". It is in searching out tail terms; those obscure terms which might include a typo or two, and the phrasing may not be correct. Unfortunately (and I don't have much time to explain this) one simply _can not_ judge a search engine's comparative performance using random users. And the Bing guys are falling into that trap. EDIT: To expand more on what I wanted to write. // DISCLAIMER: This is my personal view, and has nothing to do with my employer. There are 3 large (fuzzy) classes of queries on search engines: head, torso and tail. The head queries are small in number but large in volume: queries like "Facebook", "Google", "Yahoo", etc. (yes, people do 'search' for these on search engines. Just a handful of such queries may make up 10% of the entire search engine traffic, which would be 100M queries per day (or so) on Google. It is depressing to see the numbers). In general, any search engine worth its salt will get the head queries right. The torso is basically deciles 2-6 or so (there's no hard and fast definition). Here you'd have most musicians, actors, popular restaurants, etc. Bing and Google both would do a mostly adequate job here, for the first result. But: if you want to explore the concept a little, Bing goes astray and Google does not. For example, search for "idle hand tattoo" on http://bingiton.com/ http://bingiton.com/ . The first result is the same, to my local tattoo parlor. But the second result on Bing is from Mesa, AZ; while Google sticks with the right result and offers up other, related sites (Yelp, etc.). Google knows that "Hand" in the title is not the same as "Hands", and gives me not only the store, but also their Yelp, FB and Twitter pages; in other words: Google _understands_ your query better. And finally, the tail. Here we have obscure error codes, weird technical terms, etc.; most of which are seen maybe once or twice a day. These constitute the bottom ~30% of the query stream. This is where Google really shines. It is very rare indeed to look for an obscure term and find that Bing does a better job than Google (I have yet to find an example). So, as a user, I have a choice of 2 search engines; and one of them I know will do a better job on obscure terms. Guess which one will I pick? When Bing claims that "most people prefer Bing in our user studies" (or something similar), their conclusion is flawed because the study itself is flawed. You can't sit a person down in front of a computer and ask him to evaluate your performance on tail queries! Where are those tail queries coming from? If they are provided by Bing ("here's an obscure term, search for it and tell us what you think"), then the user has no way to evaluate how relevant the results are, because, by definition, it's an obscure term! On the other hand, if you ask the user to come up with an obscure term, it will most likely be a term they are familiar with and they'll already know the answer, so they won't really hunt for information. So in my "idle hand tattoo" example, they'll see the top result and claim satisfaction; when, in real life, I would like to see the Yelp reviews, maps, etc. for the place. If they (Bing) really want to compare how well they're doing, here's a suggestion: setup a search engine (like bingiton, but with only 1 pane of results, and neutral branding), and make it the default for a large pool of users (with their permission). Randomly, switch the backend to Bing or Google. Then, monitor the heck out of what the users do (all with their permission): how often do they click on the first result, how often do they re-formulate queries, the time to the first click, how often do they quickly come back to the results page from a bad click, etc. etc. etc.
- parfe 14y ago>Bing services aren't available right now After 5 searches the screen greyed out and was unresponsive. Guess Google wins by disqualification?
- sgricci 14y agoSame here.
- Achshar 14y agoI was Google 5-0 but with technical queries whose results i did not know for either bing or google but knew what pages should be on top. I think it is actually deceiving. While choosing I was pretty sure two of them were bing. Because one's default address for movie timings was Redmond and in other the video results were all non-youtube. Something does not make sense. Either google is ignoring youtube results and moved to Redmond or they (MSFT) changed it so that people choose other result. (not many people would get the Redmond reference though)
- benmanns 14y agoIt may be that Google uses location information from your IP address, which, for the Microsoft servers running the competition, is in Redmond. If you search "what is my ip address" in the competition, Google's results show "Your public IP address is 131.253.25.46" (or something similar). This is a Microsoft IP in Redmond. Interestingly, a reverse DNS query gives msnbot-131-253-25-46.search.msn.com as a domain name for this IP.
- Achshar 14y agoWell yes that does make a lot of sense. Kind of stupid of me to not realize this myself.
- darrenkopp 14y agoGoogle 3:2, although the problem with this is that I can always tell which one was google and which was bing based on the formatting.
- vnuk 14y agoBroken for me, after choosing first round winner both panels get darker and nothing happens... FF15
- blhack 14y agoI have actually found myself using bing lately only because it doesn't try to confuse me into landing on google+. Seriously, guys; this is a problem. I'm searching for a coffee shop or restaurant or something, and I want to link my friends to the map. I --DO NOT-- want to go to google+. In fact, I don't really want to google+ ever. For anything. Ever. Seriously I feel like I'm navigating a maze of accidental google+ links every time I use google anymore. It's really frustrating. Bing at least seems to be just...a search engine. In fact, google hiccuped all over my 8 years old gmail account, deleting my inbox (yay! Thanks for that guys, oh, and it's just lost, too bad for me!) two days ago. The upside to this? It somehow also unsubbed me from google+!
- raldi 14y agoGoogle deleted your inbox? Could you elaborate on that?
- blhack 14y agoSure. I logged into gmail.com yesterday morning, and my inbox was missing. I still had everything that "skips the inbox", like mailing lists, my sent mail was all there, but everything that was in by inbox had vanished. :( This actually made me pretty sad.
- raldi 14y agoThat is sad. Do you use POP or IMAP with GMail? And do you see anything weird in the "Last Account Activity" link at the bottom of the page? Also, were the messages merely archived (i.e., moved from Inbox to All Mail), or were they completely deleted (i.e., you can't even find them via the search box)?
- blhack 14y agoI do use an IMAP client (thunderbird) with gmail. No, no strange activity in that window. I see myself coming out of Black Rock City, and the sparse signal I was getting on Monday as a result of it, but other than that it's just my office.
- ck2 14y agoI have this theory Microsoft keeps funding bing as a tax writeoff. I've yet to see a website where the search referrals are even within 30 points of Google.
- MarkMc 14y agoAs a Google shareholder, I really want to know whether Bing search results are better than Google. And I really, really want to know what the trend is over time. However I don't think Microsoft's study is any good. They say, "In the test, participants were shown the main web search results pane of both Bing and Google for 10 search queries of their choice." So it seems that the study participant had to think of 10 search queries, one after the other. But this is not how search works. In the real world users need to perform one query every so often, and their choice of search terms is based on an immediate need rather than what comes to mind. A good Bing vs Google study would ask 1000 people to use a split-test search engine for their browser search box, then monitor the results over time. I've asked HN about this before and got nowhere: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966121 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966121 So is there business opportunity here? I imagine that there must be thousands of Google shareholders willing to pay £100 per year for the results of an unbiased, ongoing study into who gives the best search results. In fact, why doesn't Google set up the study and provide such information to shareholders?
- Hermel 14y agoYou can keep your shares. I picked Google 5 times out of 5.
- mynameishere 14y agoThe only person who would do such a study would be an analyst for a private investment firm.
- manku_timma 14y ago5-0 in favour of google. I was quite surprised too since I used fairly generic queries that I thought Bing would do as well as google. - whats on in london - ready player one - bash history across sessions
- bilal11 14y agoBing you fool but not we :) it is definite we use google search engine everyday and what search term we will use in this contest is more likely the term we already use to search frequently let say "Design" and almost know the top ten search results of google. So when bing produces couple of different search results people will give definitely give first 2 or 3 clicks to bing just for the sake of change but for long term user most important and refined results belong to Google we know :D
- bilal11 14y agoBing you fool but not we :) it is definite we use google search engine everyday and what search term we will use in this contest is more likely the term we already use to search frequently let say "Design" and almost know the top ten search results of google. So when bing produces couple of different search results people will give definitely give first 2 or 3 clicks to bing just for the sake of change but for long term user most important and refined results belong to Google we know :D
- nrj 14y agoAppears to be broken in Chrome on OS X. After my 5th choice I'm stuck on a gray screen.
- antihero 14y agoThe CSS gives it away. Bing has slightly different coloured links so you can see it quite obviously.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- omaranto 14y agoI got Google 5 - Bing 0. I did 3 math related searches, 1 math graduate student by name and 1 search about a python math library. Looks like I'll only switch to Bing if I leave math, which is not very likely. ;)
- B-Con 14y ago5/5 Google. Two technical queries, three more average ones. But I could tell which side had which search results in 2 or 3 of the tests, so I can't claim complete blindness in the test. I tried to be impartial, though.
- Loic 14y agoI am surprised how close the results are in my case. It was often really hard to say this one or this one. Near "draw" for most of them. Trying the Blekko "/monte" way as proposed here it was 50/50 Bing/Google (a bit more than 5 tests). I am not going to switch yet, but this is good news, the gap is closing and maybe, like we had an IE monopoly, we are going to move slowly in direction of more search engines.
- jaimefjorge 14y ago"we can make him better we have the technology" How about we build a community test? We could make a little page showing the results for various search engines (e.g. google, bing, blekko, duckduckgo) and and put them to a similar test. We could open and show the data collected in real time so the community gains from the experience. Immediately there is a problem: how to get the results. Naively we could use iframes to show the pages for each results. But it is not possible. We could use their APIs to get the results and show them. However these are limited to N calls on their free package. That would make the survey limited. Another way is to screenshot the page (fetched using a simple browser call) and present it. This, however, should also be paid for more than N calls.. Anyway, after resolving this, we should be go to go. We could gather data in an unbiased way and present it to the world. This is simple to make, I think. Upvotes if you think it is a good idea (for this to be a join effort probably).
- Tonester 14y agoGoogle 4-1 for me
- S4M 14y agoSomething is wrong, because I chose 'draw' twice, but apparently I prefered bing over google 4 times out of 5.
- wildmXranat 14y ago3-2 Bing. The results can be easily linked to one of the search engines so the outcome can be skewed.
- luser001 14y agoThis comment is quite late. Hopefully somebody at Microsoft will see this. I used Bing for several months. I actually found it indistinguishable from Google except for linux howto questions (Google seems to understand forum websites better). The dealbreaker for me was lack of SSL support. Switched back to Google. Nobody who uses Google regularly will switch to Bing: not enough of an advantage. But people who start out with Bing may never switch. That's the long-term game Microsoft has to play.
- kstop 14y agoGoogle for 4, drawn on 1. I like that the blurb at the end was all "whatever, we're still better says a survey". Marketing failure ahoy!
- humbledrone 14y agoI found that I was not able to take the test fairly, because it was blatantly obvious from the style of the search results which one was Bing and which one was Google. The Bing results use a slightly duller green for the URL displayed underneath each result's title, among other stylistic differences. So, the comparison is completely useless, as they did not anonymize the style of the results, and thus either conscious or unconscious bias can creep in. I expect that for users that are not aware that the results look different, there will be a significant preference for the results that they see every day (e.g. the engine they normally use).
- getpost 14y agoGoogle 4, Bing 1, but I mostly use DuckDuckGo. But Google is unmatched for geographic terms, so I override with !gmaps
- noamsml 14y agoUsing five technical searches I might actually make on a day by day basis, I chose Google 4 times and a draw once, though the results were close almost every time (once I chose Google because I searched for an organization name and wanted their homepage first rather than relevant news, and twice because the relevant result was from MDN rather than MSDN or W3C since I found that MDN tends to be the best site for actual technical reference, so YMMV).
- alanbyrne 14y ago"Bing won 1 rounds" What bothers me most about this is that the programmers didn't bother to remove the S from "rounds" when the result was singular... sloppy.
- Evbn 14y agoThe only one Bing one at was when they suppressed Google Shopping but showed Bing Shopping. I get that they think it is fair to hide ads, but Google ads are highly competitive with organic Bing. They also suppressed the Knowledge Graph box.
- gjm11 14y agoApparently like most other people here who tried it, I found that Google won conclusively for me (4.5-0.5), though in each test it won by only a small margin. My queries: one software-technical python virtual machine, one philosophical argument from evil, one highbrow musical/artistic (this one was the draw), one engineering-technical, one geeky-popular cultural.