Search Engine Showdown: Google vs. Bing

Google has been synonymous with search for years, and Bing—poor Bing—quickly became synonymous with sarcasm about why anyone would ever use Bing. Believe it or not, though, the two search engines aren’t as different as the jokes would have you believe.

We’ve talked about Bing’s biggest strengths before, but people often ignore that Bing also does a lot of things just about as well as Google. Is it better? Probably not, but I decided to give the two a real side-by-side comparison to find out how they stacked up.

The Contenders

You’re probably familiar with the two search engines already, but just for a refresher, here’s what we’re talking about:

Google: By far the most used search engine in the world, Google Search has been around since 1997 and is constantly improving with new smart results, advanced features, and integration with other Google products. As of February of this year, Google currently has 64.5% of the US’s search market share.

Bing: Bing is the latest name for Microsoft’s search engine, previously called Windows Live Search and MSN Search. Bing brands itself as a “decision engine”, aiming to present results with more real-world context than just finding text on a page. Bing also powers Yahoo’s search, which, coupled with Bing, serves 32.6% of US internet searchers.

Basic Layout and Search Features

Both sites look and feel remarkably similar when it comes to basic search results. In fact, except for the font and the logo at the top of the page, it’d be easy to confuse one for the other. Here are the main differences I’ve noticed after poking around in each:

Bing’s video search is significantly better than Google’s. This is the biggest difference between the two (and why Bing has a bit of a reputation as “the porn search engine”). Instead of giving you a vertical list of videos with small thumbnails, it gives you a grid of large thumbnails that you can click on to play without leaving Bing. For some videos, it’ll even give you a preview if you hover over.

Bing gives more autocomplete suggestions than Google does in most cases. Google only gives four, while Bing gives eight. This is particularly useful if you’re using autocomplete to find alternative products or to get wildcard suggestions.

Google’s shopping suggestions show up more often than Bing’s do, and they’re generally much better. So if you’re trying to find out which stores carry a certain product, or where to find the best price online, Google will be better than Bing.

Google’s Image Search interface feels a bit smoother when you use it, though Bing has one or two more advanced options like “Layout” (which lets you search for portrait or landscape images). Bing’s image search also lets you remove certain parts of your search term with one click, which is kind of cool (I wish it did this for all searches).

Bing puts related searches and related image searches to the right of your search results, while google puts them near the bottom. This isn’t really a good or a bad thing; it’s just a difference.

Bing has also adopted many of Google’s “smart searches”, like movie showtimes, unit conversions, local weather, information about famous people, and stuff like that. Most of this stuff is remarkably similar, though Google has a few things that Bing doesn’t, like health info and release dates for movies and video games. If you’re relying on smart searches, go with Google. (One exception: if you’re searching for flights, Bing has a neat feature that predicts whether ticket prices will go up or down.)

Source : lifehacker.com