Google vs. Bing
I am on a new machine right now, and I had Bing set as the default search engine. I wanted to install TwitterDeck, so I search for it, and got this as a result:
Can you say totally useless? Trying the same thing in Google brought me this:
First result on Google brought me the right thing that I wanted. I have no idea how long I would have to go with Bing to find what I want, and I don’t care. Google get it, 99% of the time. Even for the crazy stuff (a blog post from four years ago I remember a particular phrase from).
The problem with Bing is that it bring a lot of results that are associated with the actual search term. That doesn’t mean that it understand what I mean and how to deal with it.
I am not sure if I am making much sense here, but I hope that the difference is clear. Getting a lot of results in fairly easy. Getting the right results is the thing that makes Google the King of the Search.
Comments
So true
But Bing is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just ask Microsoft, they'll tell you.
seems to be working fine now, maybe you made this post long time ago
Was it tweetdeck or twitterdeck you were searching for?
Neil,
You can see the search term in the pictures
Perhaps it helps to spell the name right?
DVSBSTD,
You missed the point.
With Google, it gives me what I want.
With Bing, I actually need to know what I am looking for.
If I knew what I am looking for, I wouldn't need to search for it.
Change bing to the United States, I cannot insert screen, but you will be ipressed.
Also try to search TweetDeck. Also ipressive results.
What if you actually meant twitterdeck? Don't blame the search engine...
guessing 'what you've been thinking about' isn't always that great:
thedailywtf.com/.../...sExactlyWhatIMeant.aspx
I was very skeptical of Bing at first but it convinced me. This is just an example and it wouldn't be enough to draw a blanket conclusion. Especially as it's actually wrong: I don't know what happened during the last few hours, but I just typed "twitterdeck" in bing and got the following first result:
"TweetDeck: a simple and fast way to experience Twitter ... TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts ... www.tweetdeck.com/beta"
2Bertrand Le Roy this because you are sully supported maket, probably in US or UK.
They just didn't have the synonym twitter => tweet set up. They must have fixed it based on your post because it works now.
I'm not sure how it was before but a search for tweet now has twitter as the first result.
Google is great, but they have a decade head start on bing. I think that bing may actually be good enough to bridge the gap, but it's going to take time. Overall I've had decent results with bing.
I just tried it myself and there's a huge difference if I switch to UK/US or my local Estonian version of Bing. The US version is way better than Google's results in that screenshot.
I didn't think about the market support. That's a great point by Mike. I'd guess that each lang/region has its own synonym lists.
I think we are all missing the important thing here: If this was a game show and the question was about twitter clients, Oren would have gotten a nasty buzzing sound and I WOULD HAVE WON THE CAR!!!
yes google is better, which begs the question why you or anyone would use Bing as their default? Now I know you better Oren in that you are not a Microsoft fanboy, but everyone else I know that switched for a while this seems to have been the reason.
Big misconception about bing is that this is something that Microsoft came up with, but it's not, they bought a company that had this tech and they renamed it and branded it to Bing.
you posted a while ago, that you are looking for a new machine. which one did you get?
LOL comments saying he spelled it incorrectly are missing the point, the point is google was able to tell what he wanted and give results...
I'm sure bing would show TweetDeck as #1 if he actually put in "tweetdeck", but he didn't.
Google gets better results because everybody uses it. It's a giant neural net: the more people training it the smarter and more accurate it gets.
That said, the results are almost always on par with each other. The difference is in the most obscure stuff. And the reason why Google finds those queries is because there is a higher probability that somebody has searched for it before you on Google than there is on Bing. That's why scale matters to MSFT.
BTW, as other's have pointed out, if you search for "TweetDeck" on Bing, you'll find what you're looking for.
Google is better not necessarily a software issue, it is a crowd-sourcing issue.
Any search engine can index text and match on keywords, but it requires crowdsourcing and human training to "teach" the search engine how to find the best result.
Inspect the source code on a google search page, you will see that they monitor what you click, and try to keep track of which link was your "final choice"
Google has more traffic, therefore they have better crowdsource power, therefore they have better results
I've had the same problem with various terms event when spelled right. Basically, I typically find what I want on the first page if not the first 3 hits using google. I haven't gotten that sort of accuracy out of bing with an consistency, which is why google is once again my default search engine as of yesterday.
I agree with Mike.
Bing isn't quite that bad. They just completely ignored the non-US market and for all those outside the US it's a complete joke while in the US it's totally awesome.
But still.. Google has one major point right now: They know my trends and my Google Search wiki entries, so they sort my searchresults differently than everyone elses..
greetings Daniel
Remember the file search doggy from Windows Explorer? You had to tell the bastard everything: is it a document, a movie or a song? How long ago have you seen it? Did you modify it? In what directory should it be? Having seen that I'm shocked Bing is actually finding anything without asking you seventy three yes-or-no questions.
I was reviewing "The Search" book about 4 years ago, which tells the Google story.
The guys at google were explaining their ultimate goal of reading the minds of the user, so that they can show most relevant results.
Obviously that's impossible, but interesting how search technology keeps advancing to cope with more and more variables other than simply what was typed in a search box.
www.amazon.com/.../1591840880
Bing works great for searching MSDN content - for general searching I still use google.
The way I see it is Bing is more of a consumer search engine; where as Google is a content search engine.
I pretty much got this feeling based on all the marketing videos that I watched on Bing before it went live, all of the marketing revolved around how easy it was to eventually buy something you were searching for.
My 0.02
Set your language/locale in Bing to United States-English. It's a completely different world. Why they haven't rolled out that version of the engine to the rest of the world completely beats me.
The "international" Bing is literally the old Live Search with new branding. The US version is a completely different beast altogether.
twitterdeck on the US version brings up a comparable result to your Google results.
Henning,
I just did, and re-run the search, it still giving me the same results set
@Ayende: Use this: http://www.bing.com/?mkt=en-US
As someone said above, it seems to be a completely different system...
Bing got improved by a lot comparing to MSN search, but Google still has no rivals in the mean of quality. Unfortunelly.
What I can't work out is why anybody has tried Bing yet. I'll wait for version 3 and in the meanwhile I've got work to do and/or stuff to google.
Same thing as above.. French version of Bing is only Live Search with Bing visuals. I switched to en-US and I have now the same level of results than google.
if you've got time to waist on twitter, you might as well waste it using incabable search engines ;-) that said, I've always had bing in US mode, and it works just fine. no idea why it doesn't work for you. mind to send a stack trace?
Change of Language/Locale doesn't help me. What helps is a change of Country/Region in Bing (in the upper right corner).
I haven't found google to be any better than bing at all. I have found different results, but have never identified a search that worked better on google.
Solution: don't use Twitter
Next time you want to compare google vs bing, just use http://www.bing-vs-google.com/
"Big misconception about bing is that this is something that Microsoft came up with, but it's not, they bought a company that had this tech and they renamed it and branded it to Bing."
whoooh, i totally thought that microsoft that came up with this 'bing'..what company actually that had this tech b4 microsoft bought it?any ideas?..looking it somewhere but could'nt find it..
As many said already switch it to US country and bing it again...
The results of "US Bing" are equally valid IMO as Google ones
Go check it out for yourself
www.bing.com/search?q=TwitterDeck&form=QBLH&qs=n
Out of curiosity, where you logged into Google at the time of the search. Google optimizes search results based on personal information if you are logged in. If you were logged in, then I think it is not so straightforward a comparison. I discovered this when a coworker and I kept getting different search results for the same search term.