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.