Of late, there has been a continuous talk of comparing Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, with the market leader Google. While there is no dispute about the fact that Google continues to the market leader as a search choice by a wide margin, there have been reports that Bing has gained a reasonable market share. Which is the best search engine?
Well, give it a try yourself. Visit either of the following five sites where both Google and Bing are placed side-by-side in a single screen with a single search-box (the second site, i.e., BlindSearch will compare three search engines). Try to search certain keywords and you’ll be able to decide for yourself as to which is the best search engine. Also, try to “reverse-search”, i.e., try to search some known keywords on some particular website, especially relating to the newly updated content, and if needed also include the name of the website in the search keywords to find out whether these search engines are able to show that particular web page in their search results. Here are those five sites to compare Google and Bing:
Here is how you input a search term in a single search box in one of these sites:
And, here is the sample result of searching a sample text “select strong password” as seen in Bing and Google placed side-by-side on the same screen.
My comparison of Google and Bing shows that Bing is far way behind Google in quality and quantity of search results. I also find that latest content on the web is updated by Google almost in real-time and it holds true even for new sites. On the other hand, Bing is quite slow to show the new contents on the web, especially if it is not from a popular website. Apparently, Google crawler, Googlebot, is sitting on each website ready to grab the new content as and when posted on web. Bing crawler appears to be lazy, and does not update its results inspite of being “informed” of the latest updates. Of course, this is my judgment. You can draw your own conclusions by comparing the two search engines.
Let me also point out that the search-algorithm used by Bing appears to be more or less like a clone of Google’s search algorithm, with some superficial changes here and there. I don’t think it would be possible for Bing to beat Google in its own game. Google has been using its search algorithm for last about a decade and has built up huge database of the content on web during all these years. Bing cannot suddenly overtake Google using the same or similar algorithm, more so when it already has the disadvantage of the initial gap of contents between the two. To beat Google would require some new innovative idea which should perhaps change the way people search the web or the way the search results are produced; and such new idea should be in a position to catch the imagination of the people. About a decade back, Google came up with an innovative idea of searching the web and changed the way to search the web for its contents. Now again, some new innovative idea can only change the present market positions of the search engines. What such new idea could possibly be is beyond my imagination; perhaps a genius only would be able to deliver it and I am no such genius. But, I think, one thing is sure, a clone cannot beat the original, more so when the original is already the market leader with a huge margin and is available for free use to everybody. Moreover, my experiments (see below) show that the rate of updating the Google search database appears to be much better than that of Bing. So, the gap would increase rather than decrease unless something extraordinary happens.
As for Yahoo search engine, let me point out the response which I got from Yahoo after submitting the URL of one particular site to crawl and add to Yahoo search results. Thus goes the Yahoo reply:
“Thank you! Your URL has been added to our list of URLs to crawl. Please expect a delay of several weeks before your URL is crawled. Note that in the effort to maximize the quality of search results that appear on Yahoo! and our other distribution partners, we do not add every submitted URL to our search index. Therefore we cannot make predictions or guarantees about whether your URL will appear as a search result.” (emphasis is mine.)
So, Yahoo states that it would take several weeks for its crawler to crawl the URLs the information about which has already been submitted to Yahoo!(!!!!) and moreover, there is no guarantee that the URL would be added to its index! What a lazy web crawler! A typical bureaucratic approach! Taking several weeks in today’s information age! In fact, the ideal reply should have been that “immediately on submission of your URL our crawler has just visited your URL and it has just been added to our search index; you can check it now itself”.
What about Bing? OK, it did not give an answer like the one given by Yahoo; but at the same time, inspite of being submitted with the URLs its web crawler is yet to get time for reaching those URLs. Perhaps, Bing’s web crawler is somewhere on the way, as the URLs may perhaps be on the other side of globe so it will also require time to reach at the URLs.
And, look at what Google crawler did. It indexed the same URLs on its own about two weeks back (within a day of the new URLs coming into being) without there being any need to submit the URLs to it! Moreover, any new content at the said URL is indexed almost in real time by Google search engine without being asked to do so. As I said earlier, Google’s web crawlers are waiting at your website to grab your contents immediately after it is launched.
No doubt, Google is the best and continues to be the best!!!
In any case, you can yourself test the two search engines sitting on a single page, in the websites noted above. But, please try also to search some odd keywords and odd and less-popular keywords. If you compare the two search engines only with some popular keywords or with content from some popular websites, you may not find much difference for the obvious reasons.
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