Bing vs. Google

Results Analysis and Conclusions

To say that we were surprised to find Bing did remarkably well against Google would be something of an understatement. It perhaps might have been better for Microsoft to ditch the Live Search label altogether rather than pitch their new search engine as an 'evolution' of it. Bing is no more related to Live Search than bit-tech is to the PC World website.

Starting off with the home page did bode well though many of the touches such as mouse-over points with details and links about the daily photography are a little superfluous. The photography itself though is gorgeous and the homepage is almost worth a daily visit just to check it out. Having MSN and Hotmail on your search engine home page is a great boon too.

On the other hand, it will take Microsoft some time to compete with the comprehensive list of tools offered by Google. The latter search engine offers everything from email services to documents and an RSS feed reader and there will be a lot of tools that people have become very comfortable about using over the past few years.

To find a continuous stream of images on Bing's image searching page was a most pleasant surprise. Anyone that uses Cooliris will know how much more convenient is it browsing images in a constant flow and it's a wonder this is the first time we've seen it in a search engine. Cooliris also has a bad habit of pestering you for updates often and if you use more than one browser then it can be a bit of a pain.



The relevancy test was a much closer call. The fact that there could even be a decent bit of debate about which one was the better of two is a good result from the newcomers. Both search engine's would have done a decent job had you been searching with our test criteria. In terms of speed, there really wasn't anything in it with both search engines bringing up the results near-instantaneously.

The shopping results were a bit mixed. Searching for the Nokia N97 Google game up with more results, a load of accessories and found the cheapest one for sale by a massive margin. Searching for a Radeon HD 4870 1GB though, both search engines came up with the same price. Bing doesn't come up with as many results as Google's built-in price checker which kicks in when it finds the same item for sale at several retailers is a handy touch. The cashback option is one that we're particularly hopeful to see here in the UK. The idea of building up a pool of cash as we go about our online shopping is extremely appealing.

Overall, it's safe to say that Bing is far from the washout we were expecting. With Windows 7 also starting to look very promising, Microsoft appear to be on a roll that could actually just about make up for how much of a pain in the butt User Account Control is. If the US version of the search engine is anything to do by, we'll be giving the UK version a chance when it goes live.