That was fast. Irish programmer and SEO specialist Paul Savage has made this very basic web service, which lists all results for search queries on Google and Bing side by side so you can compare which one produces the best results for the keywords you enter on one single page. We’ve played around with it a bit and found that the tool proves that the user experience for both search engines really is very different:
- searching for ‘Google’
Google will show news results about themselves first, and a link to their homepage later, which makes sense since people are probably already on there. The rest of the results consists of Google products and local versions of the search service. Noteworthy difference is the presence of a button that lets you drop down a widget displaying information about Google’s stock without the need to leave the page.
Bing, on the other hand, provides a list of possible extended search queries on the left sidebar, and a list of useful direct links to Google services below the first result. It also lists ’similar’ searches on the right sidebar (not visible in this screenshot) with alternative services – Bing being the first one they recommend. It also displays a box that you can use to jump to Google search, and it keeps track of your search history right on the page, unless you turn that feature off.
- searching for ‘TechCrunch’
Google only shows internal network links on the first SERP with the exception of our Twitter account, Netvibes profile and Wikipedia entry, while Bing mostly shows links to third-party services (Wikipedia, OnSugar, Flux, Blip.tv, AboutUs.org, Facebook, GitHub, Mahalo, etc.). From the viewpoint of TC the company, the latter situation is not ideal, and to top it off running the query on Bing apparently means potential visitors will see the names of competing blogs in the left sidebar. On the upside, you can open the Wikipedia article on TechCrunch on the same page, which makes for a seamless user experience if information about us was what you were looking for.
- searching for ‘Linux’
Using Google, you get much better results for this query, period. Google lists at least five very relevant links (Kernel.org, Debian.org, RedHat.com, LinuxJournal.com and LI.org) that you will not find in the first 15 search results on Bing. No nifty sidebars, nor any amount of spot-on similar results will help Microsoft here.
- searching for ‘Office Space quotes’
Here, Bing takes the top prize, although with this particular query the results are much more similar, which can be attributed to the fact that it is more detailed (three words instead of one like the other examples). Why do I say that? Because Bing is the only one of both that correctly lists the movie Office Space’s Wikipedia entry in the first few results, while Google doesn’t even list until the fifth page of results (both rank Wikiquote quite high). Also, this is where the extended search options in the left sidebar at Bing really shine: ‘Office Space sound clips’, ‘Office Space WAV files’, ‘Office Space Clips’, etc. – that’s the stuff you’d likely be looking for.
It is far too early and this is far too unscientific a research method to jump to any conclusions – we’d need a Jump to Conclusions mat for that – but using Savage’s tool gives you a nice clean overview of what most people who’ve tried both engines today: Google and Bing at the very least feel very different, and while you can argue about the quality of one engine versus the other back and forth as much as you want, it’s painfully clear both need improvement. Of course, if there continues to be no clear winner on the quality front, then Google has already won the battle before it starts, expensive ad campaigns be damned.
That said, please allow me to reiterate a point Michael made yesterday as well as in the past, that I most definitely agree with: Microsoft is damn right not to give up the search game yet like some are suggesting they should. Please stop calling for a monopoly in search, let these companies compete and fight hard for every user, and I’m sure we’ll see more innovation in this space soon enough.
(Via @PatPhelan)
I certainly agree that it was really damn fast for the programmer to come up with the search comparison service. Hats off to Paul Savage
What are you talking about? It’s two frames. No big deal.
It was naming as generic “live” that went badly wrong, 3 years back. Live is confusing as it means different things, a search service must be friendly to novice users. Also goog adsense making money through novice user misleading, proof being international(novice market) revenue being more than US one. Better late than never MS renamed it, and currently redirecting live.com.
Seeing how many times, Microsoft has changed names of its search engine gives me a perspective that Microsoft has no firm ground of innovative search technology to stand on in order to gun down Google. Bing, well, may be a little better and likely be another Live’s brother.
What you are talking about is marketing, it has nothing to do with technology behind bing or live or msn
Microsoft it re-branding its search engine and attempting to take away the “buyers” from Google and bring them to Bing. The obvious consequence of this would be a shift in advertising dollars from Google to Microsoft. However, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft’s mammoth marketing effort will pay off in the long-term.
My feeling is that Microsoft will at best break even on this project.
I agree that “live search” was confusing. To me, it meant being Live TV, meaning real time, and didn’t really relate to internet searching in any way. If it meant “to live” then that would be kinda cool as in “live your life online” but that reminds me of AOL as a neighborhood experience and MSN didn’t really give a good neighborhood experience.
Yahoo propped up Google for years and tech-savvy users were familiar and trusted google when it went independent. Yahoo will do the same for any future independent search service they offer.
+1
truly no more than 5 minutes
Takes around 40-45 seconds to code that thing up. Programmer omg !
That’s what you call Smack Down ? :/
I was hoping you would do side by side comparison of various search terms.
Nvm.
p.s – All Bing posts on TC are similar, move on guys ?
No they are not similar, Techcrunch keeps me updated with all latest happenings.
And I think Google will win over Bing only because of their database. Comparison between them should be made after a year when Bing will collect some more data. Once Bing gets aleast 95% of data which Google has, they are ready to dominate Google.
Don’t be silly. Bing has been around for ages, under the names MSN Search, Live Search, and now Bing. They’ve had more than enough time to increase the size of their index.
What people have missed that Bing might be a brand new release of live search+Powerset which would basically make it a much more powerfull search engine.
The guy above (Rohit) has posted correctly. As the corpus increases, maintaining accuracy, and rather increasing accuracy will be the key.
The problem is, people will blindly bash microsoft for whatever they do, without even thinkly properly about it.
IMO Bing.com is a good effort, we should wish more success not only to bing, but other search engines, so that we never have a monopoly situation in the search engine space, and always have competition and innovation.
What else you need in the smackdown friend.?
I think this is quite a nice comparison by TC.
And the conclusion is quite clear that Bing is nowhere near Google.
Silly me thinking I would read something worthwhile…
Catch up guys, you’re lagging.
I tried video search and image search. Video search is really adorable, returns results way better than Google Video does. And for Image search, Bing loads much faster. But the Similar Images feature works on Google pretty good, Bing returns one or two “similar” images, and the rest is totally irrelevant.
I’ve tried to fully review Bing, check that out at http://bit.ly/IJVkq
Regards,
Ahmed
I guess comparing Google and Bing is not going to serve any purpose. People who use Google will keep using Google, only because Bing might be as good as Google, but not way better than Google. There is a potential to capture market share only if there is a difference in search results from Google. In my opinion, real-time search can make a big difference. One should compare these services with real-time search engines like twitter, boilingpage, twitturly etc. I used my favorite real-time search engine http://www.boilingpage.com and here are the results for the same keywords:
http://boilingp...arch=Techcrunch
http://boilingp...ch=office+space
Results are pretty impressive in the real-time search
MSFT should not give up, Google should not give up.
But they should both realize that we are competing for a market that has maybe 3-4 years left in its present state – less if the economy begins to recover quickly.
Search is dead, and has not future. As we move into a contextual wor;d (and some examples are appearing), search becomes irrelevant.
Should they give up? No, it is all we have for now. But long-term implications are nowhere to be found in this market.
Search is dead?
The search market only has 3 to 4 years of life left?
Your post is probably one of the most absurd posts I’ve ever seen on the internet.
Now of course, as I type this reply, I’m reminded of: http://xkcd.com/386/
Wow, you lost me. How is search dead? I use the Google search box in Firefox more than I use the location bar and I am sure most other people do too. Without search, the internet wouldn’t be usable. What do you suggest should replace it?
I guess you are trying to say that because of the huge surge in use of twitter, the coming “Wave”, etc. that just plain search will be dead. i.e. that these forms of information transfer will displace web pages.
But on the contrary, I think they complement web presences but don’t replace them, just like RSS feeds don’t replace blogs but rather make them more accessible.
I agree with robert!
Really don’t know what estaban is trying to say!
seems completely absurd!
problem is, everybody is pretty happy with Google already and only few of the people will consider switching.
Actually, that’s not true.
One of the articles on the design of Bing went into the user research used to help define the experience and feature set. While there’s a positive brand association with Google, the actual satisfaction with the search results was quite low. People still need to do a lot of work to parse the results, make a quality assessment, etc. That’s the opening that people are trying to get at.
Can you post a link to the article?
Are you yet another Microsoft paid schill? Or just to stupid to be able to parse your phrasing for a search engine to deliver meaningful results? Microsoft needs to not only be broken up but dissolved completely as a corporation and also be ordered to pay restitution for the years of pain and anguish it has caused to ordinary consumers and businesses by producing an endless string of shoddy products.
Hi Robin
One of the interesting “Google vs Microsoft” battles is in the travel vertical.
Microsoft seem to be going towards transactional help (i.e. finding flights, telling you whether a product is well priced or not)
Google are heading towards research (i.e. aggregating reviews, mapping etc)
I have written a few thoughts on Bing on my travel ecommerce blog
http://www.tour...-website-onion/
Doesn’t look like Microsoft has given up travel search yet, at least!
Hey Robin
At least try it with some real queries! Average query length is now 3.6 words ///
Better yet, everyone should try the tool I wanted to point to and run comparisons.
Hi Robin
I will do a few travel comparisons when Bing travel launch their travel blogs and community…. which they did originally announce but now that announcement seems to have gone from their PR blog
http://www.bing.../05/announcing/
Is where it originally was
A very good comparison is made but I think Google’s monopoly is in Danger now! Because, As we already know that more than Half of the Google search results are related to sexually explicit content, and Bing clearly Indexes the Sexually Explicit videos in its Video section. Try searching any Adult query in Bing after turning off the Safe-Search option. If you are an Pornaholic then You will love it!
he hey.. Strange research
Same thing with Google video or image search if you turn off SafeSearch.
Crunchbase needs an update – I’m pretty sure Google was launched a little before August 2007 …
(see the Google Search facts box)
Yep – try January 1996 for Google.
Definitely a nice little tool to compare results. I have been playing around with Bing since yesterday and the more I see it, the more I am getting convinced that Microsoft have a winner in their hands.
Bing is being positioned as a Decision Engine which has 4 major strength areas : Shopping, Travel, Health and one more. This is an incredible way to search in any of those areas and even on a search engine level it is almost as good (if not better) as Google.
Google has to work in the direction of a Decision Engine as this is the first time that in the search space Google will have no choice but to follow what Microsoft has done as that is the way to move forward.
The big thing that Microsoft has to conquer though is the “Google Branding”. Google has become synonymous with Search. While I have no doubts now about the quality of the new search engine, now Microsoft will have to use adopt some very smart marketing and branding techniques to take real market share away from Google.
I see that as a possibility now.
Agreed with Akshay.
Yes Bing seems pretty good. It will be good to a choice in search engines.
Do you guys have any stats on bing’s usage in its first days? Any shift in the search market share?
That would be a bit early, no?
already live.com redirects to bing. just use alexa or goog trends etc.
Hi guys thanks for all your comments (and searches), true it’s just frames, but it saved me a bit of time yesterday, and I wanted to share something.
And Robin mentions it himself, it’s a “this very basic web service”, nothing more than a tool to make a comparison that bit easier.
Thanks,
Paul
Goood job paul and thanks!
Hey Paul,
Some people might criticize it for being basic but it is very helpful. Thanks for sharing.
-John
Yeah Paul… these developers taking the time to call your work basic, and simple reeks of jealousy a la : “Why didn’t I do that and get Crunch coverage!”
Don’t sweat it bro… good work.
I have my website with page rank 1 in google but are having 5-6 page rank in bing for same keywords so this shows both have very different results
Competition is good, it’ll make the search experience better for every one.
Are you sure that the wikipedia page is relevant to “office space quotes”? Google ranks it lower but after looking at it, it doesn’t really have any relevance to the query (it contains no quotes, first of all). Wikiquote, however, is pretty sensible. For that query, both results pages are basically the same.
Nice one.. but any one tell me which is the best ‘google’ ya ‘bing’
When you search for Bing on Google, it does not give you a search box to search on Bing.
But, if you search for Google on Bing, you get a search Box to search on Google.
Don’t be Evil
Nice little tool you have there, Paul. Was able to compare my SERPs in no time. Now I’m wondering why my website isn’t even showing up in Bing after typing in the full address. Strange..
An illustration of how good they are both getting, is that the ‘Office Space quotes” read to me as you wanting quotes for office space. Granted the capitalization should have made a differance, but it didn’t for me on reading it, a human, who knows and like the film.
We’re getting into Turin territory, re ‘accuracy’ here.
fyi – search engines don’t care about capitalization, unless all letters in the word are capitalized… just sayin!
On the ‘Office Space quotes’ search, why is the Wikipedia page so important? It doesn’t contain any quotes from the film, and doesn’t link to any pages that do.
And it’s not even in the first ten of pages on Bing, whereas it’s at the bottom of page 4 of Google for me.
It seems a little artificial to give Bing a plus point on this basis, I have to say.
Worth a debate, but I think it’s important to note Bing does a better job at linking the query to the movie than Google does. Also, the bonus point was primarily for the sidebar suggestions.
Robin : hover over the movie and you should get a quick snippet of it (with sound). These little UI enhancements will make the difference in the long run, I’m sure.
partly a search error – a better search would have been “office space” quotes – google finds lots of stuff then.
Ive made up my mind. Paul Savages’s innovation is the new King of Search.. No compromise about it… its the best compromise to this Search war.
I’ve just posted a comparision between google and bing for health searches – which I judged a draw!
http://blog.tri...for-health.html
Try maps.bing.com and check out the bird’s eye view which gives a nice 3D view which is much clearer than what google offers with their maps.
Interesting – I searched for “OracleDataSource” on Bing and Google since I was looking for info on that anyway.
On Bing, a Microsoft site (msdn.microsoft.com) is the second item returned, whereas Google doesn’t show any links to Microsoft until the 2nd page.
My conclusion from this brief, unscientific study is that results using Bing are probably going to be skewed in Microsoft’s favor.
It’s funny I hadn’t heard about Bing until this week but I’ve seen around 20 articles on them in the past two days.
It might have something to do with the fact Bing didn’t exist until this week.
owned!
Latest reviews are great and search results are coming along well.. Still need to see what regional results it can show based on the demographic location of a search..
Video results were good and detailed! Happy to see that Microsoft has finally come up with something that can really give a big fight to the search engine champs… GOOGLE!!
I’m officially in love with Bing. I detest the mashup, that Google offers in their results, of video, news, images and actual results (I’m not even starting on the ads) . I would liken Bing to the original Ask.com 3D Search. Basically the same information but at least if you’re looking for something specific you know which section to be looking at.
While Google remains my focus on a working level (until their market share changes) I’ll continue work on what works for Google. But lets hope that this is the start of something new from MS!
Bing seems to be nice but as with any search engine it still needs improvement
I put my company name in BING and there are 53,602,000 results. It is a unique name so there is definitely no way it could be as common as “Cream Donuts”.
The same search on Google yielded 1,450,000 matches.
Either Google is hiding those pages, or the bing index is more extensive.
Either way, I am very impressed with BING (U.S). Bing International still sucks though. I hope it’s just temporary.
This is not a correct comparison. We all know Google archives search history therefore when you search for a term it already knows what you have searched for in the past.
Example if I searched for Chelsea in Google 2 weeks ago and clicked on the link for Chelsea football club if I did the same search today Google would assume I may be looking for the same link again and push results related to Chelsea and football to the top.
In Bing as I have not used it before how would it know by just searching for “Chelsea” that I was looking for the football club and not say the area or even Clinton daughter!!
Bing can only be compared when its an accurate test.
Bing is really great, but still requires a bit more publicity to be successful…
Has anyone here tried FuzzFind Web Search (www.fuzzfind.com)? A mashup of the different search engines and social bookmarking sites might be a interesting alternative.
I must be honest–I took a look at Bing with the assumption I would blasting all the different ways it is lame. But after using it at work for a day and running both simple and complex queries, I find the Bing search results to be at least as good as Google. Where Bing really stands out is in the suggested related searches, which are often relevant and helpful. Also, I have wondered for the longest time why Google does not include an intuitive search history, which can be used to track and manage searches that span multiple queries. With Bing, search histories appear on the left in a way that is simple and unobtrusive. I liked Bing so much that I have changed it to my home page and am going to try it for a week.
I was bing’d today. I have my default search engine set to use google in IE 6, and this morning, I did a search and it switched itself to using bing. MSFT seems to think it owns my computer. Anyone else having similar behavior?
Me too!! Evil Empire shit!
yet another biased pro google post…Imagine if Bing would have been launched by Google. Then same people at TC would have gone ga ga with so many great features and how it improves user experience which no one has done…and putting it positively it results in little less searched but come on its just a days old give it some time and we are sure bing will make it big…
but…reality is its launched by MS so TC has to bash it and bash it
I didn’t read it as pro-Google at all. In fact, if it wasn’t for this article I wouldn’t have used Bing at all today. It brought me back to Bing, which I believe is the key to its survival, breaking peoples routine. Sure we all check it out cause its new, but when we get the urge to seek information, we are all still hot wired to Google it… This post was anti-Google in that respect. So in short: get off your high horse buddy, save your “biased” sermon for posts that actually are… otherwise they just make you sound simple and slow. Bing.
One test I did was search for
“Grandenetti Chemistry 221″ and this produced absolutely no results in bing.com. It does not even suggest the correct spelling of the professor’s name, which is Grandinetti.
On google.com it was smart enough to also show the results for “Grandinetti Chemistry 221″. because I was misspelling the professor’s name.
If I was using only bing, then I would have never found this professor’s homepage but Google was useful enough to still help me despite spelling his name wrong.
As a result, I think I will stick to using google and will only test drive bing when I get bored.
Nice article Robin. And you’re right for calling for a showdown between these companies. Monopolies are bad, and if there’s any company that has the resources to compete with Google, its MS.
I personally am not a huge Google fan, despite the fact that they have the best search. I don’t like their PR system, which has created virtual PR “harems” which hog all the top rankings. Its basically leading to a de-democratization of the internet.
i try http://www.blac...bing/search.php
i search for “google” and “bing”
and i found that bing cannot found his self with “bing” keyword, what the result is only bing.im on the top result.
i think google result is better than bing
Yes, Paul Savage is the man for coming up with a great comparison tool at the flip of his wrist. All I can think of when I first saw the title of this article is, “What the heck is Bing? As in, Chandler Bing from Friends?” lol. I must say, this article does have character. Thanks for the information and rock on Ireland!!!
I heard Microsoft came up with name “BING” which stands for ” Because Its Not Google” is this true?
On the basis of two trial searches, Bing did as well or slightly better than Google. I’m impressed enough to give it a try.
searching koders.com …
Bing completely fails. Its as if MS is on purpose ignoring the site.
Search the following on google and Bing
koders.com rtldeleteregistrykey
Nice to see objective side by side comparisons. However, each search engine will have its own merits for a particular search phrase from one day to the next.
are you really gonna go there
Bing web search are having ‘Content Encoding Error’ since yesterday. see http://twitpic.com/6gags I’m not sure whether it happened only from where i access (Malaysia). Maybe somebody have to alert Bing…
Though Bing has included some very nice features and I really found Bing’s Video and Image Search better than Google’s but still I would prefer Google for most of my search queries. For me Google is still the King of Searching. Bing is a very good attempt by Microsoft to beat Google but it will still take Time before Microsoft can beat Google.
Just wondering if anyone took notice of http://bingandgoogle.com which went live on day 1 itself!
Nice to see side by side comparisons. each search engine will have its own merits for a particular search phrase from one day to the next.
To me Google is far superior to Bing. Bing seems to be faster but brings back far less results, so maybe that is why it is faster.
I tried this -
“bing sucks big time when comapred to google is this correct or wrong give me some examples for this question”
on google and bing and bing gives only 5 results and are totally unrelevant. But google gives relevant results and many more.
I try “google sucks big time when comapred to bing is this correct or wrong give me some examples for this question” and are better the bing answers…