17 June,2009 09:58 AM IST | | Balaji Narasimhan
How good is the newest search engine on the block? iT ADDA compares both search engines with five different sets of words to find out where they both stand
Microsoft has a very daunting task in front of it it has to get people to say 'Bing it' instead of 'Google it' and considering that Google is so firmly entrenched in the minds of Web users, this is difficult. However, both search engines being free, users are bound to make a quick jump from one search engine to another if they so desire. There is nothing that holds you to any particular search engine.
Today, search engines employ various techniques, but end of the day, we users want only one thing results. We don't care what is under the hood. Which search engine gets us to what we want to know about with the least amount of headaches? That is all that we want to know.
That is why we put both search engines through the paces to find out who gives you what. For the search phrases, we chose four common things that people are bound to search these days and added a twister at the end.
>> Shiney Ahuja: Bing gave us images, the IBDB entry and the Wikipedia entry, which are bound to be useful. Google led with the news and also gave the Wikipedia entry and saved images and the IMDB entry for later. While Bing would normally be good enough, we liked Google better because it gave us news, which is what matters today.
>> Swine Flu: While Google gave us links to the CDC (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) in the US and gave us the Wikipedia entry, Bing led with a story that told us that 'Swine flu refers to a respiratory infection caused by influenza A viruses that ordinarily cause illness in pigs' and also gave us a nice link to an article on this disease. Granted, everybody knows about swine flu these days, but Bing's approach seems better because it gave us this content from mayoclinic.com, and for us users, in a medical emergency, a medical site is more trustworthy than Wikipedia.
>> Deepika Padukone: Both sites led with images of the actress (well, what else did you want?), but there was one nice difference in approachesu2014while Google showed you the Wikipedia entry and followed this with the actress's site, Bing did this the other way around.
>> Dhoni: It is hard to say with this term. While Google was good because it led with the news items, we were also pleased because Bing gave us the Wikipedia entry for the cricketer, followed by the Wikipedia entry for a multi-purpose sail boat with a motor, which is also called a dhoni. This is useful if you are searching for the boat and not the cricketer.
>> Bringalada: Every journalist writing an article on search engines should have his own site so that he can see for himself how it gets indexed by popular search engines. Such a site also allows you to put in some words that don't appear on other sites. Here, on my site, I have a word called 'Bringalada', which is an ancient Tamil name for Prahalada. I have known for a long time that Google shows ONLY my site when this word is typed (of course, when this article is published, it will show two links), but I was surprised to find that even Bing led to my site when this search phrase was entered!
As you can see, both search engines are tied three times (Deepika Padukone, Dhoni and Bringalada), while Bing is better than Google once (Shiney Ahuja) and Google is better than Bing once (Swine Flu). While this is hardly a comprehensive test, prima facie, both sites look evenly matched. While they will no doubt compete among themselves fiercely in the days to come, as users, the best advice for us is thisu2014use both search engines to find what you want. After all, both are free and you should only care about what you want.
Methodology
While comparing two search engines, it is important that you feed exactly the same text into both. Even using double quotes in one engine and not in the other could give you improper results. Therefore, we searched for all these words in lower case (without quotes) in both the search engines. The words were selected based largely on current concerns and typed into notepad, and directly cut and pasted into both the search engines to ensure that both got exactly the same search string.
