Monday, June 1, 2009

Bing versus Google: Queries and results

There are many differences in Microsoft Bing and Google when it comes to results and as far as I can see right now, it's Google having a upper hand on Bing. Here are some of the examples I found.

First came the ego search, that is, when I searched my own name, I found first result as someone else's page on Bing while it has been my blog on top on Google. Well, that cannot be actually counted as a failure though it disappoints me, and many other bloggers have had the experiences.

So I decided to do some filtering. I added the name of my hometown with my name which is a proper way to filter as my hometown is quite small and there is fortunately no other known figure of my name in my hometown yet.

This time Bing treated me better and gave me top three results related to me. But then, from the fourth result onwards, it was stuff that had some Harshit somewhere and Najibabad (my hometown) somewhere else, with no connections between the two. Google's algorithms win on this one. They show entire first page for me only. And even after that, I'm there in many results.

Enough of me, I decided to go on something more popular. This time I typed 'colors' in the query boxes of Google.com and Bing (which I had had set on US). Colors is a new, and very popular TV channel in India. Both Google and Bing gave no results. I knew the reason and so I came to Google.co.in and changed Bing's country to India. This time round Google gave its third result as Colors, the TV Channel, while Bing was not aware of its existence until I reached fifth page.

Next on my search was Whitefield, the area of Bangalore I live in, which is, with electronic city, actually the centre of the activities for which Bangalore is known in the world. While searching on Bing US and Google.com, the results were almost similar with Bing giving Whitefield a fifth place and Google adding a suggestion for 'Whitefield Bangalore' after 3 results and giving 3 results on the same. In fact here, Bing looked better than the Google page as it adjusted the results for Whitefield India normally.

But again when I came to Bing India and Google India, I was surprised to see that Whitefield, India was still in the fourth poisition on Bing while Google India not only had its first 3 results on Whitefield, but also showed 'Whitefield Bangalore' again after first 3 results. (personally, I think suggesting Whitefield Bangalore is a good idea as Whitefield is a suburb and generally people query whitefield Bangalore rather than Whitefield alone) So this time Google again emerged victorious.

So right now, Bing might be equally good as Google with individual entries, that is single word/phrase queries, but when it comes to filtering results, be it by country or otherwise, Google is proving better.

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