Bing Tops Google in Search Accuracy

[onehandle]

Source: PC World

According to research by Experian Hitwise, Bing (and Yahoo Search powered by Bing) achieved a success rate of 81 percent for January 2011; Google, meanwhile, managed only a 65 percent success rate. Both of those figures are unchanged from December 2010.

Experian defines "success rate" as inducing a user to click on one of the search results, which does leave Google with some possible excuses. For example, perhaps users are finding the information they're looking for right there on Google's results page and don't need to click on any of the links. After all, lots of people like to use Google as a spelling checker these days.

On the bright side for Google, it is still the heavyweight champion when it comes to overall usage, pulling 68 percent of all U.S. searches. However, it can't rest on those laurels. That 68 percent figure for January is down from 70 percent in December 2010, while Bing jumped from 10.6 percent to nearly 13 percent, an increase of 21 percent month over month.

There's still a big gap between Google and Bing when it comes to usage, but if Bing proves itself to be more accurate and more useful, Google could be looking at the first serious challenge to its search dominance.

Read more: http://www.pcworld.com/article/219264/Bing_Tops_Google_in_Search_Accuracy.html?tk=rss_news

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I made fun... A lot of fun of Bing when it launched, but lately I've noticed the results it produces are cleaner and more accurate than Google.

With this report, I'm switching for good. Actually probably to Yahoo, since it's powered by Bing anyway.

[phantom power]

1. Speaking as somebody who worked on content retrieval algorithms...

"click-thru-rate" is a terrible, terrible measure of "search accuracy"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specificity_%28statistics%29

[Thunderstruck]

24. My job depends on search results.Can you tell me something about search

algos that I may not know?

[SecularMotion]

2. Google: Bing Steals Our Results

"Suspecting rival Bing piggybacks off its results, Google ran a sting operation to catch Bing in the act. Google says it's proven that Bing copies results from users' searches and uses the info to bolster its own output"

http://consumerist.com/2011/02/google-bing-steals-our-results.html

[jayfish]

7. I listened to a rather in-depth discussion over this issue on TWiT.

It's mostly not true. To try and catch Bing; Google engineers tweaked their algorithm so that a few crafted, esoteric, search terms would display crafted results. They ran the same terms through Bing and got exact matches on (IIRC) 9 out of 1000 searches. Now, it might raise your eyebrow that they would get any matches at all but .9% is statistically irrelevant.

[SecularMotion]

12. Bing doesn’t deny Google’s claim

"Indeed, the statement that Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, emailed me yesterday as I worked on this article seems to confirm the allegation:

As you might imagine, we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking, but like the rest of the players in this industry, we’re not going to go deep and detailed in how we do it. Clearly, the overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search, so we can guess at the best and most relevant answer to a given query."


"Only a small number of the test searches produced this result, about 7 to 9 (depending on when exactly Google checked) out of the 100. Google says it doesn’t know why they didn’t all work, but even having a few appear was enough to convince the company that Bing was copying its results."

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914

[jayfish]

14. Sounds like boiler plate.

I bet, if posed the question, Google would say similar. I think it's much ado about nothing.

[boppers]

21. 9 out of 100.

Not 1000.

9% is a tad more relevant than .9%.... especially when the searches should have had 0%, when searching for nonsense like "hiybbprqag"

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914

[proud2BlibKansan]

3. Yuck. I hate Bing.

I've had better luck with Google.

[qnr]

4. They're probably only clicking through to get the hell off of the Bing page. n/t

[xxqqqzme]

5. Did MS pay for this 'research'?

[MisterP]

9. what exactly makes you say that? (other than that it comes after the honeypot scandal)

(just curious, not combative--or passive-aggressive)

[Xithras]

6. Bing is Microsofts best try to date, and it works well, but I still like Googles results better.

Bing has some funny behaviors. As an example, I live just outside of Modesto California. If I go to Bing and do a search for "Democrat", both sites generally return the same site results, but Google presents it better. I can expand the listing for Democrats.Org, for instance, and see a listing of sub-pages on that site related to my search. Bing has no equivalent.

Interestingly, Bing's automatic location search also injects three LOCAL search results into my search for Democrat..."Republican Central Committee", "Republican Party of Stanislaus", and "Republican Women Federated". The word "Republican" wasn't included in my search, and NO local Democratic Party offices are included in the listings. I don't consider this to be anything nefarious on Bing's part, but it demonstrates some of the logic problems that exist in their search engine. It figured out where I lived, and decided to add totally unrelated local results simply so that it could offer something local.

Google, by contrast, would rather display NO local information than display BAD information.

Oh, and Bing's image search is slow, buggy, and full of broken links.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

10. I've been using the Firefox add-on "100 search engines"

but only for the last few days... I can't tell yet if it really works better. :shrug:

[enlightenment]

13. ah - must try this.

I don't mind Google for most things, but I miss the old meta-search engines from the 'olden days'.

[thesquanderer]

11. Success means NOT clicking on a result...

For Google, the most "successful" result is that, instead of clicking on a search result, you click on one of the ads. If they are serving more relevant ads that get clicked more often, then theirs is the better business model, even if every ad click means one less result click.

[Tikki]

15. This is not true for me...

Bing is not unique or extra productive and their format is odd.


Tikki

[sofa king]

16. Much of Experian's business seems to lie in favorably reporting on Microsoft Bing.

According to a quick Google search, that is.

[originalpckelly]

17. Bing's feng shui is bad.

[Raine]

18. I HATE Bing, somehow it attached itself to my home page and I had a hell of a time removing it.

Google is what I use, Bing is the last one I would ever use.

[Frank Booth]

19. I've found Bing to be surprisingly good for search.

And it's one of the best places to book airline tickets. The image search is also really good, but since Google quickly copied it they're pretty similar now.

[bemildred]

20. This PR slop is not LBN. nt

[Blasphemer]

22. I didn't realize Yahoo was Bing powered

Didn't it used to use Google? That does explain why Yahoo results suddenly became superior to standard Google results.

[boppers]

23. Yahoo is not *entirely* Bing powered.

Background: I run about 12,000 queries a day, against bing, yahoo, and google, as part of my work, and track those results. I follow these numbers quite closely.

Yahoo "officially" switched over to using Bing for vanilla natural search results a bit back, but while the results are often very similar, they are not always identical, as yahoo still uses additional modifiers for things like maps/places.