Bing vs. Google

Relevancy

This is the real key to a search engine's success. If you're looking for the latest game releases and all a search engine spits out at you is the cricket results, you're not going anywhere fast. We're going to take a look a few common searches and some shopping too to see how the combatants fair.

Test Search: 'Restaurant in Miami for under $50'

Anyone who has been to America will know that the food is pretty bad (I really like some American food, so it's not all bad - Ed.). However if we're in Miami and wanted a restaurant for under $50, there's a good chance we'd start by hitting up a search engine. The top results of both Google and Bing were ideal if you were in such a situation too.

The top link in Google was for Hunch.com on a page that provided a top list of restaurants to eat in Miami for under $50. You pretty much couldn't do better than this page if you were in this circumstance. There is a massive list of food joints of varying styles with photos of the interior and a brief description, all of which are in the desired location.

Google's second link wasn't quite so succinct, linking to a blog post about one particular restaurant in Miami. The third hit was a forum post to which there was a good number of replies all of which contained information pertinent to the search. After this though the hits became less useful, with mostly food blogs giving opinions on individual restaurants.


Bing's first hit was 10best.com which was opened on the page for restaurants in Miami. The page isn't as well-presented and easy to use as the Hunch.com page but, with the different cuisine types listed down the side, it provides more choices than Google's first hit. The page also lists categories such as cigar-friendly to make sure Mafia bosses don't feel left out.

The second hit was another restaurant guide from miaminewtimes.com followed by Hunch.com on the same page that Google opened up as its first hit. Bing pretty much came up with restaurant guides from top to bottom of the first page. The only issue we had was that there was a few duplicate pages present.

Both search engines would have helped someone on the search for reasonably priced chow in Miami. However, on the whole we were somewhat shocked to find that the newcomer actually provided a considerably more comprehensive list of food joints than Google in this search.

Test Search: 'Explore Miami'

What better to do to walk off our massive lunch than a bit of sight seeing? We typed in 'explore Miami' to both search engines to see which one would give us the most cool stuff to go and check out.

Google's first hit was Justflorida.org opened up on the Miami page. It's a text-heavy website that's not especially well-presented by does have a lot of information on the city and things to do. Strangely, Google then goes on to show uk.holidaysguide.yahoo.com on the Miami travel guide page. There are a lot of images of cool places but there's little to no info on them, or more importantly, how to get there. The third link was to exploremiamibeach.com which was both more useful than the two links above it. The website provided a list of attractions with links to the attraction's website for more detailed info.


Bing's primary hit was Miami.com and checking out the website, it's easy to see why as just about every interesting attraction is listed there. Bing's second hit was the Miami Wikipedia page, followed by Miamidolphins.com, the city's American football team. There was actually two pages for this with the search engine spitting out another duplicate link.

Following this was the website for Miami airport which was also not so useful. What was interesting though was that underneath these links, the rest of the results had been split into Miami-related categories such as Miami, Miami weather, tourism and attractions. The latter contained further relevant info including one website that lists the top ten things to do in Miami.

The subsections organise the links nicely and the breaking down of the long list makes them easier to browse. However there is some loss of relevancy as one of the sections is for Miami real estate, videos and images of the city. Google also tailed off after the first few links and seemed to provide a lot of sport-related ones for things such as the university athletics team.