Tuesday, June 2, 2009

How Well Does Bing Handle New Stuff?

Microsoft’s search engine Bing is doing pretty stable on certain types of queries. But one thing Google has been doing exceedingly well in the last years is proper indexing and ranking of very new stuff. (Not too long ago, it was surprising and noteworthy when Google added a blog post below an hour or so... these days, it’s almost expected!) For a comparison, I wanted to see how well Bing does on more fresh topics. The Google & Bing comparison tool comes in handy for tests like these.

What did I find? Note my tests were non-representative; I simply mostly took a couple of items from the Waxy.org link blog, as it contains new stuff. In the end, quite a few queries resulted in Google and Bing doing equally good while quite a few other queries resulted in Google doing substantially better. There was no instance during my tests in which Bing was beating Google when tested on these fresh items, though.

Below is a list of where Bing failed, specifically (admittedly, “failure” is somewhat subjective in search engine rankings, and my search queries may be “biased” in some way due to mostly coming from Waxy). Disclaimer: the queries were performed yesterday and today, so things might have changed in the meantime; also, I only took into account web search results on both search engines, and not news oneboxes:

• [dj & the fro] - on Tuesday, this worked on Google (bringing up the new MTV series), while it failed on Bing (bringing up a MySpace DJ unrelated to the series, same for auto-completion; MTV.com is not found on the full first SERPs).
• [project natal] - Google shows the Xbox Natal homepage first, an Engadget review second, and CNet third. Bing does not show xbox.com in the first page of SERPs at all, but shows a potentially spammy blog – latestknews.blogspot.com which says “CLICK HERE: www.loss-weigh.com”, though at least the page also contains an apparent copy of a Natal review.
• [Tales of Monkey Island] - Google shows the official actual Telltale homepage with info about this (including a trailer). Bing shows a page merely embedding a trailer; that’s not wrong, but also not quite as good.
• [Zoho CEO on Google Wave] - Google at the top shows the actual recent post where the Zoho CEO comments on Google Wave. Bing shows an old post (from January 2008) where the words “Google Wave” merely appear in a “latest comments” widget.
• [tim oʼreilly google wave] - Google finds the actual blog post by Tim on the subject of Google Wave, at radar.oreilly.com. Bing puts a profile page about Tim at spock.com first – radar.oreilly.com appears only once in the SERPs, but with an unrelated post from 2007.
• [us government data] - Google shows the new data.gov among the first page of SERPs, Bing doesn’t have data.gov on the first page at all.
• [kevin fox nilla] - Google shows most relevant blog post as first, Bing as second entry.
• [gmail automatic message translation] - Google ranks the official post on this recent feature first. Bing ranks the official post 4th, and puts someone merely copying the original source (without credit, on a blog titled “Latest SEO news - Trick n Tips”) first.
• [Classic Movie Quotes, as Translated to Japanese and Back Using Google] - this was the title of a post from Blogoscoped, posted half an hour ago at the time I searched. Google had it already and presented it at #1, whereas Bing didn’t have it at all on the first page the time of searching (Bing lists mostly general sites instead, like iGoogle, YouTube, or Answers.com).

Here are a couple of queries where I found both Google and Bing doing equally good, if differently at times – note these were not all the queries where they both did well, I’m just showing a limited set of samples:

• [Mozilla Jetpack] - both different, both good.
• [Goodbye GM by Michael Moore]
• [Twitcaps]
• [Star Wars first draft script]
• ...

But fresh queries isn’t all there is to a search engine! It might be Bing is doing better on another type of queries (comments on this welcome!). It’s also worth noting that the difference between best search engine and second or third contenders is growing increasingly small these days... Microsoft generally did a very solid job, and they find the “correct” page on many queries.

Getting search as right as Bing must take an impressively huge effort, though that also raises the question of “why” – which problem are they trying to solve? Which deficiencies of Google do they want to make up for, what niche are they trying to target, in which ways do they want to offer more to users than Google already does? And if for the sake of argument we assume Microsoft has solved the problems Google tackled several years ago, then how many years will it take for them to solve the problems that today’s Google handles well, like ranking fresh stuff? And if they do ever catch up, isn’t there a good chance Google already reached the next level by then?

[Hat tip to James!]

How Well Does Bing Handle ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (25)

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