Bing, which is the amalgamation of Microsoft’s Live Search, MSN Search and Live Search initiatives, is marketed by Microsoft as a decision engine offering more precise results and less clutter than Google.
A slew of TV adverts for Bing promote it as the antidote to “search overload,” a direct jab at Google being a general search engine with broad and sometimes confusing search results.
As opposed to Google’s iconic logo on a stark white background, Bing is popular for using stunning photos and images skinning its search service. A big development coming from the Microsoft-Google partnership of 2009 is that Bing will power Yahoo! Search, putting it at the disposal of tens of millions of users who may not even be aware they are using a new search engine.
We used Bing exclusively as our de facto search engine for a number of weeks and were satisfied by its performance and the relevance of the results. In terms of depth, however, Google is still light years ahead specially if you consider its dominant place in the global market.
Bing focuses on specific categories and aims to give users quality results rather than too much information. You can see how Bing strives for pertinence when searching for a professional athlete.
Aside from the requisite news and Wikipedia entries, Bing offers links to the athlete’s stats, biographies, videos, related searches and links to merchandise. Results are neatly categorized and more intuitive to the search.
Google, on the other hand, will feature the most recent news as well as an assortment to photos, video and other media.
In a recent battle of the search engines competition held by the software testing experts at uTest Google, Bing and Yahoo went head to head as users searched for performance, relevance, bugs, speed and usability. The results were as follows.
“Nearly 90% of all survey respondents said that Google was their favorite search engine. However, 10% of survey respondents said that after testing all three, they would now make Bing their default search engine, and more than 30% noted that Bing surprised them favorably.”
Google came up on top in accuracy, speed and relevance with Bing coming in second and Yahoo coming in last. Considering that Bing is still very much in its infancy and has already made waves. Bing has a very long way to go to bump off Google as the top ranking search engine but it has an excellent chance of cementing itself in the no. 2 spot.
Curious about how Bing performs against Google? Try out Bing vs. Google and run a search to see how the results differ.
