Google vs. Bing... Whose the Winner?

You might have seen a hell lotsa blog posts on this topic or atleast something related to it. Why you? I've seen lotsa them. You can check some on my links blog. Before writing in detail, let me give an intro for the dummies.

Google: A search engine by a company with the same name, established by Larry Page and Sergie Brin (Stanford passouts) in 1998, whose major revenue comes outa ads in search result pages as well as other sites like blogger, reader et al. They are plunging into more domains as days pass on. The word 'Google' is derived from the term googol in math which some argue to be 1 followed by 99 zeroes while other say its 1 followed by 100 zeroes... Nevermind...

Big heads: Larry Page, Sergie Brin, Marissa Mayer, Eric Schmidt...

Bing: A search engine by Microsoft, company by Bill Gates Jr along with his mate Paul Allen in 1975, Major revenue from OSes developed by Microsoft (MS for short). Windows 95, Windows XP being the major revenue generators along with their office suites. Also revenue from royalties for development frameworks like .net, COM, COM+, MFC etc... Also into producing gadgets like Zune, Surface computing.

Big heads: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer...

Enough of the introduction. Lets dive in.

Let me make these points clear first:

1. I'm not criticising one company holding up the other.

2. My conclusions are based on the experiements i conduct hereby...

3. To help us out, searching both these search engines (bing might claim itself to be decision engine, still) we have a site which gives us results of both engines side by side... Here is the link. I've checked it on both sites as well as this site to get identical results (Foolish experiment though)

Given a pen, you would write your name first. Atleast this is what a survey says as what I've read somewhere. Likewise, given a search engine, I would search myself. Call me a narcissist, I don't care!

So, let me search myself... Here is what I got.


Well, look at that! Bing shows the link of a site which I hardly use. Also, there are no links related to google's site. My blog is on blogger which belongs to google, we can see that bing supresses contents from google. I've seen it many a times.

You can also check out the number of matches found as result. Google has more results as it caches more.

Lets move further. The narcissist inside me is hurt. To satisfy him, lets search a different name. dabbanannmaga is my twitter login name. Lets find what both the sites have got to offer me on that.

Here we go...


Aah! a bit of relief here now. But before the deal between MS and twitter (as well as Google and twitter on social media search), bing was showing me enidhi's twitter page as the top result. Things have started working my way atleast for this search.

Enough of me, lets search for bing. The newer of the search engines. Lets check how both of them treat each other.


Well, Google is generous enough to provide is results with 10 times those found on bing itself...

Finally, lets search Google on both. Here we go for the final search.


Look at that! How generous Google is and how stingy bing is... just one single result for google? Grow up MS...

Even you may try on these lines... Please do let me know about your views commenting here. You may also try searching common rivals/allys to both these companies like apple and twitter respectively...

Before we conclude, let me cough out a speculative thought running in my mind since the release of bing... Mind you, this is just a speculation. What would have made MS to name their decision engine bing of all the rest? Some ideas I get are

1. bing, a kinda sound you get when an idea flashes.

2. bing, look out the g at the end, 'g' symbolizing google? so, is bing an acronym which contains google?

3. bing, again, the g factor comes into play but it might not be an acronym. might be a secret code. bing, bang? bin google, ban google? of course, the intentions of MS in creating bing is to dethrone google as the world leader in web search. literally throw google in the bin. This might be the scenario well this is the strong speculation running in my mind.

Now to conclusions.

Lets list out the merits and demerits of both engines.

Google:

Merits:

1. Numero Uno in web search, hit by bing slightly since 4-5 months.

2. Caches more number of pages than any search engine.

3. Page Rank, helps people write more specifically making searches better.


Demerits:

1. Can provide related suggestions as in bing. [Might have such feature but I'm unaware of, Of course, it suggests as you type, thats one]

2. Can provide a short list of search history as in bing.


Bing:

Merits:

1. Claims itself a decision engine, giving the best possible page first with less number of searches and in less time. [I'm quite doubtful of the latter though]

2. Has tiny helpful features like suggestions, search history.

3. Initially was blocking sites with adult content from getting searched. I liked this feature.

Demerits:

1. Caches less number of pages.Search bandwidth shrinked.

2. Has to be a bit generous in pages giving results related to rivals.

3. Net neutrality isnt quite evident.

Finally, There have been many companies which came to limelight just for a few weeks probably for a few months which claimed themselves as google killer. But they commited suicide in no time.

Bing has been giving strong competition though it has its own demerits. Will it kill google? Only time has the answer but for it to do that, it has to undergo large changes along with the small ones I've suggested in this post.

Signing off... Once again, pour in your comments.

64 = 65??

Guess you had also got a mail with this subject. It partitions a 8X8 square into 4 pieces and re-arranges it in such a way that it forms a rectangle of dimensions 5X13 and try to prove that

8X8 = 5X13
==>64 = 65!!!!!!!!

This video might help you visualise it. Check out the comments for possible errors or solutions.

This problem was first pointed by one of the mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson who also penned Alice in the Wonderland with the pen name Lewis Caroll.

Okay! Lemme tell you. That video or the mail you saw assumes that the slopes of all the cut pieces to be the same which in reality is not. They have different slopes across their slant edges. You may try it out on a graph sheet to get confirmed.

Okay I'll post what I did on my graphic editor here.

First of all, we have a 8X8 square. Let us cut them into 4 pieces as seen in the video.


Lets try arranging these four pieces into a 5X13 rectangle. Here is what we get.


You can notice that as the slopes of the slant efges of all the four pieces vary, there is a gap between them. In face it is a parellogram with the area 1 square unit which is exactly the difference between 64 and 65 (8X8 and 5X13).

Let us try another similar problem. Let us take a square with side 5 units and divide it into 4 parts as given before and try it to arrange inside a 3X8 rectangle. If those who didnt knew, they would equate 24 to 25 as done for the previous problem.

Here again, the slopes vary, but now, instead of leaving a gap at the centre, pieces overlap , which exactly explains why we cannot equate 24 to 25. In fact, the area covered by the overlapped pieces equates to 1 square unit.

One can't tweak math so easily, aint it?

If one diggs more into this, they'll find a pattern in the sequence. Lets try to find it.

In the first problem, the lengths considered were these numbers. 3, 5, 8, and 13.

Similarly in the second one, the lengths considered were 2,3,5,8.

didn't you notice that these are fibonacci numbers in order?

Forget the first number in both the examples, we have 8 square = (5 X 13) - 1 ,

Similarly, 5 square = (3 X 8) + 1

We have the fibonacci sequence as

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89..... ==> F0, F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6, F7, F8, F9, F10, F11......

Writing the above equations in F form, we have

F6 X F6 = F5 * F7 - 1
F5 X F5 = F4 * F6 + 1

In general, Fibonacci sequences have the property,

Fn X Fn = Fn-1 * Fn+1 + (-1)^n

This problem is just a specific version of the above property of fibonacci numbers.

This is just one small property of the innumerous of fibonacci numbers...

Just came to know about this fact yesterday from a book that I'm reading since a week. Thought of sharing it with you guys.

Interested to know more about such properties, read that book...

Alfred S. Posamentier and Ingmar Lehmann, The (Fabulous) Fibonacci Numbers,

Thank you...

Fedora 11 - Leonidas, Released.

Hey all!

Just thought of tell you all that a new version of Fedora has been released. Downloading the image. Hopefully its just as good as its previous versions. =)

Check it out here.

Actual Size of a DVD

A month ago, was tryin to burn a DVD to its maximum extent. Had a Sony DVD which claims its capacity to be 4.7GB. But when I tried burning data worth 4.7GB it said, please insert a disk with 4.7GB of capacity.

I kept on reducing it by 100 MB i.e., 4.6GB, 4.5GB but in vain.even 4.4 GB didnt work. Also, it was giving me confused error messages about DVD+R and DVD-R formats.

After a bit of googling, I found that the 4.7 GB of a DVD disk is actually 4.7 * 10^30. That boils down to 4.3 * 2^30 i.e., 4.3 GiB. When i reduced it to 4.3GB, everything went well. Just thought of sharing this info so that you don't face it further. =)

Problem of the day - I

Will be posting problems I'm working on under this topic regularly (As regular as possible).

Currently working on placing chess pawns on a standard chessboard. Problem description goes as follows. Hope I come up with a solution asap.

There exists certain number of chess pawns ( pawns here do not mean only soldiers, it can be any chess pawn). Given the initial placement, one will be given pawns sequentially which he needs to place it on the board in such a way that it doesnt hit any of the existing pawns.

Try it out... Good exercise though! Happy solvin... =)

Another interesting tool by Google, Insights

Hey Hey Hey!!!

For all those who are interested in statistics and web pages analysis and page hits as well as related stuffs,

Here is the tool which does just that. Its named google insights. Pretty powerful in its search, google is now ready to give analysis of searches performed worldwide. What people like for, what they google most for...

It has many salient features like comparing by search items, location and time locations, one can filter based on location, Ex: How many in India are searching for such n such a topic, also based on date. Also, you can select sub regions like how many in Karnataka in India are searching for this topic. They have the results cached since 2004 and this workds from that particular timeline. You can also filter on timeliens like 'from last 30 days, from last years, have a look into it for more info.

Also, search items are based on categories like say Sports, Internet, technology, so you might make your search faster by selecting only those categories you are interested.

It also gives you a graph (from the timeline you selected and shows the number of searches on that given topic, For Example, I was searching for Dr. Rajkumar whose graph was pretty normal but it reached its high on mid of April (Exactly 12th of April, when he had died), Seems reliable for your searches.

Also, it gives the top search strings people google it for and its rank too. It gives the top 10 countries who had googled it for along with the percentage. Besides, it colors a world map, coloring region dark of those regions where more people search for it. This is one of the cool features.

It also gives you the search strings related to your topic whose counts are rising day by day.

You might think, this works for everything. Actually it keeps track of those topics whose hit counts cross a certain limit ( I have absolutely no idea as to what that limit is... )

Topics like 'Jaggesh' will display the graphs and the top searching countries (4 in this case as of now), but search terms related to that will say "not enough search volume to show results"

Surprisingly, selecting subregion Karnataka says not enough search volumes to show graphs. I see something fishy here.

If you search for a more obscure topic like 'Napolean Dovva', it says not enough search volume again.

So, to be searched by google insights, you gotta have your page rank high and the number of hits should be more.

Atleast this is what i observed in an hour spent in the past two days. Hope I gather more information and get back to you. Hope this helps you out.

My tale with setting network connection on Fedora 9

Well, here is my story!!!

Had installed the brand new Fedora 9 on my home PC. Had forgotten the network settings and during installation, It had asked for network details like the IP, default gateway etc...

I had not noted it down previously. Thought I'll configure later and skipped the step. After installation, I wasn't able to browse the net. Obviously, reason being, the network connection not set properly.

Since then, Was just busy setting network connections but in vain. tried different kinda network, ethernet, broadband, xDSL and what not? This went on for 8 days exactly till today.

Today, I just deleted all sorta connection I created and just restarted the network service and voila! ITs working and I'm publishing this entry in this blog.

Still don't know the reason behind it. Will post it once i come to know about it.

Fedora 9 rocks \m/ !!!