Why Google’s better than Bing

So, I’ve been doing a little test by using Microsoft’s new search offering Bing, as my exclusive search engine. There’s been a lot of hype about Bing; so I was interested to see how it stacks up against a service so comprehensive I’ve labelled it our collective brain.

First thoughts are that Bing does the 80% type searches well. Search for your homepage or a standard 80% term and the results are good. It also has some nice bells and whistles; such as thumbnail previews of search results.

But here’s the thing.

Once you get to the 20% type search terms (I guess you’d call this the ‘long tail’ of searches), Bing’s pretty average.

So today I reluctantly booked a cut (haircuts, how I hate thee). This was the search term I used:

tony and guy the junction

(Note, by the way, that there are five words in this phrase. A general pattern emerging in search is a lengthening of search terms being used as people get more ambitious to find the exact result they’re searching for, and/or re-search after a poor initial results page.)

So I ‘binged’ tony and guy the junction.

The results speak for themselves.

Bing’s results
www.myspace.com/flamingodude <— Que?
The Diary Junction Blog <—- heh?
Tony & guy salon Toronto | Yelp <— Ah, no….The Junction, not Toronto.

Bing very nicely copies Google’s search URL structure, so it’s easy to replace bing.com with google.com, and hit enter to see what Google chucks back.

Google’s results
www.toniandguy.com.au/newcastle.html

No need to look further. Perfect.

Ahh…Google. Come here my friend.