
Bing vs. Google - pykello
http://www.bingiton.com/Landingpage.aspx?form=MBIOST&publ=TWITTER&crea=TEXT_MBIOST_September_Com_TBIO_1X1
======
ChuckMcM
Ok, so I found it amusing that they don't include Blekko, I mean we _did_ make
this into a fun game with our three card monte game with our /monte tag in
search results :-) And I suppose it doesn't really serve their interests to
'lose' to a little guy either.

That said, its an interesting experiment. And at blekko.com we've been running
for over a year [1].

What we've found is that there is a huge brand bias, which is to say that if
you use some search engine as your primary search engine, you tend to think
that is the best one regardless of whether its Blekko, Bing, or Google (or
even DDG although DDG is more a search utility rather than a search engine as
it doesn't have its own web index).

But 'quality' is also a very subjective thing as well. So if you search for
highly SEO'd categories you will find the Blekko and Bing do better than
Google mostly because there is a curated input (in Blekko's case it was from
day one with it's from slashtags and in Bing's they started doing outsourced
curation (putatively after seeing how effective it is in Blekko :-) in some
topics with their 'editors' program [2]) At some point Google will realize
what Bing and Blekko have which are that the 'indexing the web' problem became
the 'filtering the web' problem when the signal to noise ratio started
decreasing in about 2005, and that the only viable weapon at the moment for
human on human spamming (this is where real humans are working for 5 cents a
page to write web pages that draw hits) is human judgement.

If the Bing guys are reading (and I know you are) why not open up your
challenge to the new kid on the block, we don't just do Blekko vs Google in
our monte results :-)

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-
blekkos-3-en...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-
blekkos-3-engine-monte/)

[2]
[http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...](http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/11/14/introducing-
bing-editors-picks-a-guide-to-great-sites.aspx)

~~~
pilgrim689
"so I found it amusing that they don't include Blekko"

Just took a look at Blekko. It looks good, but you can't honestly believe the
layman cares as much about it as he does about search engines coming out of MS
or Google. Does the layman (MS' target audience here) even know about Blekko?

~~~
calinet6
Honestly I'm not even a layman; I use DuckDuckGo and Google and read HN
(obvs), but I've never even heard of Blekko. Looks nice, but I completely
agree: it's a little disingenuous (or perhaps tunnel-visioned) for him to
believe that people really know about it.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Heh, perhaps.

DDG is a great product, we are one of their partners and we are providing some
of their search results. They are also quite popular on HN I think in part
because of the cool things they have been doing about creating interesting
one-box kinds of things. But that said, they aren't a search "engine" they are
a search "provider." That isn't a bad thing, in fact its a good thing because
you can get Google results through DDG without having to get Google's "value
added" stuff like G+ friends feeds or being "bubbled" as Gabe is great at
pointing out. But the difference is that if the search engines stopped
providing results, DDG would stop being able to return them until they built
their own index. As would a number of other places like search.com or
dogpile.com etc. The weird thing about search is that until Blekko came along
and built a third, there were really only two web scale indexes being used,
Bing's and Google's. Amazing is it not?

So I think DDG is pretty cool, love the ideas that Gabe comes up with, and am
happy to partner with him to provide access to our index.

To rebut your statement that I was being disingenuous however, I suppose it
depends on how measure or define 'well known.' From the perspective of various
traffic reporting companies blekko.com is a bit more well known than
duckduckgo.com which is not a perfect measure either but it does provide a
different perspective.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Hmm, we're (DDG) not a search engine? Come on.

Actually we crawl the Web a lot and have a bunch of our own indexes. A more
apt description would be a hybrid search engine. More details at
<http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216399>

Just to be clear, are you saying you no longer backfill results with Bing?

Also, we don't use any Google results right now.

~~~
ChuckMcM
No, your not. But that isn't a bad thing. From your link:

 _"we do not expect to be wholly independent from third-parties."_

That is the technical difference, search _engines_ do expect to be, if not
wholly, then at least materially independent from third-parties, they _are_
the third parties, search _providers_ are all about the experience.

But lets be really clear, that terminology distinction really only matters
when you get behind the search bar as far as the world is concerned we're all
search engines, even if, like search.com, they don't index anything, and while
DDG provides tailored indexes which support key aspects of your site's
experience. The differentiation is the experience in that case not where you
get your data. And I fully recognize that this distinction is not important
for a large chunk of the Internet [1].

For a general audience, yes, we're all search engines.

For a technical audience, no, we're not. And the distinction is whether or not
you have a generalized web index or not.

For organic search they present to the end user in a nearly identical way,
caveat the 'experience' benefits of one over the other.

But for other things, like "tell me all the sites on the internet that copied
this article verbatim." or "give me a rundown on link authority to all inlinks
to this page" those kinds of things you need both a web index, and rights to
use it like that. That's a pretty objective difference in capability.

So in technical company (and I consider HN to be technical) I try to be crisp
about the terminology, in non-technical company I refer to all of these
offerings as search engines because it is less confusing and frankly they
don't care what its called, they type in words and get results.

[1] My father in law (part of the 99%) thinks he logs into "Google" to get to
the internet because Chrome defaults to Google's home page when it starts up.

------
MarkMc
As a Google shareholder, I _really_ want to know whether Bing search results
are better than Google. And I _really, really_ want to know what the trend is
over time.

However I don't think Microsoft's study is any good. They say, "In the test,
participants were shown the main web search results pane of both Bing and
Google for 10 search queries of their choice."

So it seems that the study participant had to think of 10 search queries, one
after the other. But this is not how search works. In the real world users
need to perform one query every so often, and their choice of search terms is
based on an immediate need rather than what comes to mind.

A good Bing vs Google study would ask 1000 people to use a split-test search
engine for their browser search box, then monitor the results over time. I've
asked HN about this before and got nowhere:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966121>

So is there business opportunity here? I imagine that there must be thousands
of Google shareholders willing to pay £100 per year for the results of an
unbiased, ongoing study into who gives the best search results. In fact, why
doesn't Google set up the study and provide such information to shareholders?

~~~
Hermel
You can keep your shares. I picked Google 5 times out of 5.

------
Sindisil
Google, 4 to 1.

Now, all of my searches were technical; I plan to try again later with more
general, "normal people" searches. Bing may do better there.

Also, good results from even google searches have become harder to come by in
the last year or so. I have to work harder at my search terms. I don't know if
that's Sturgeon's Law at work, or if there's room for a search engine to
improve enough to become better than google.

Perhaps targeted search engines are the answer (i.e. engines's who have both
their search and crawler algorithms tuned for a specific target audience) are
the answer?

~~~
rfergie
I did a mixture. Google won technical searches easily. Bing marginally better
on the others

~~~
ken
I've noticed this as well. The closer my searches are to what (I imagine) a
typical Google employee does every day (Linux/Python/Java/HTML/HTTP/CSS,
English language, American locale, someone in their 20's/30's, etc.), the
better it does. Google search can be incredibly good at taking a partial Linux
error message, and leading directly to a solution.

The further my search is from this, the worse the results I get. I'd say this
is a common theme throughout Google's software. Google Wave, for example,
seemed to be aimed squarely at the "I'm a Google engineer" use case. (I assume
not many Googlers ride the bus, because that's a weak point of their maps!)
The Chrome commercials they're running right now are a great example: they
look like something straight out of the old demoscene, that Google engineers
might do in their spare time, not something that I could imagine a use for.

------
corin_
Maybe I was imagining it, but four out of the five I did I felt I knew which
was Google and which was Bing - not from doing searches that I would
recognise, but just from the extra non-search information / lay-out.

I did my best to still pick without bias to my current search engine (Google)
but ended up picking them 5/5 and Bing 0 times.

~~~
quandrum
The site breadcrumbs using ">" always give away Google unfortunately.

~~~
addandsubtract
So does the lighter blue of the bing links.

------
blhack
I have actually found myself using bing lately only because it doesn't try to
confuse me into landing on google+.

Seriously, guys; this is a problem. I'm searching for a coffee shop or
restaurant or something, and I want to link my friends to the map.

I --DO NOT-- want to go to google+. In fact, I don't really want to google+
ever. For anything. Ever.

Seriously I feel like I'm navigating a maze of accidental google+ links every
time I use google anymore. It's really frustrating. Bing at least seems to be
just...a search engine.

In fact, google hiccuped all over my 8 years old gmail account, deleting my
inbox (yay! Thanks for that guys, oh, and it's just lost, too bad for me!) two
days ago.

The upside to this? It somehow also unsubbed me from google+!

~~~
gruseom
I find the Google+ spam annoying too, but my pet peeve is the redirects Google
put on search results so they can tell which ones you click on. I hate this,
first because it feels invasive and second because it noticeably slows things
down. Most of the time it's not that bad, but every now and then it adds a
second, or 2 seconds, or 5. I got so mad I astonished myself by switching to
Bing for a while. And indeed the Bing experience was much faster. I've
switched back to Google for now, mostly out of habit. But I've gradually gone
from being a big fan of theirs to a grudging captive. Something could jolt me
into a different orbit.

~~~
AncientPC
There are extensions to get rid of the redirect:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dohbiijnjeiejifbgf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dohbiijnjeiejifbgfdhfknogknkglio)

~~~
gruseom
Thanks! I'm going to give that a try.

Edit: holy shit it works! You just made my internet faster. How did I, or
rather everyone, not know about this?

------
kaolinite
Google 4, Draw 1, Bing 0.

Why? Because I tested it with fairly specific queries. A while ago I tried to
switch to Bing because after testing it with a few general searches, it seemed
just as good. However, when I switched and started searching for compiler
errors, etc - I soon switched back because the results were just nowhere near
as good.

Here's what I searched for:

    
    
        bash: !": event not found error
        gtk calendar tutorial
        python import gtk error
        seed funding in uk
    

Something to remember by the way is that Google has spent a lot of time and
effort on their "bubble", that is, search results personalisation
(<http://dontbubble.us>) and it is a big part of what makes their results so
great. That influence won't be present in this test.

------
CodeCube
Ended up picking google 4-1. I'm somewhat of a bing fan in the sense that I
find them good enough for most searches. So I was a bit surprised that the
results ended up skewing in google's favor ... guess that kind of backfired
for them :-P

~~~
mtgx
5-0 in favor of Google for me. 3 of my queries had 5 words, one had 4, and one
had 2. Bing is almost as good at solving the easy short ones, while Google can
solve even the long queries.

~~~
BitMastro
I got a draw and then a 5-0 for Google. A couple of result for Bing were
weird, like displaying "Seattle" when I searched for "a" (the letter), NSFW
images when I was searching for a novel ("accelerando"). Google knowledge
graph it's just too much ahead ("age of mcgyver") and it has better results on
maps and evaluating expressions.

------
Karunamon
Bing seems to be a bit better at generic, broad searches (games, file
extension $something, etc) and Google seems to be better at exact, specific
queries (stop error 7B, RPGs announced at PAX 2012).

Bing ended up winning, which shocked the hell out of me, but after trying a
couple more times, I noticed that pattern.

~~~
moondowner
And at the end of the day, what I need are exact/specific queries.

Whether to get the job done, to get some certain information or something
third.

~~~
korr
DuckDuckGo is now a hundred times better than Google for those exact &
specific queries. I was looking for some info on my truck engine, and Google
sent me to sales pages for completely unrelated parts (and sometimes, entirely
unrelated cars!). DDG sent me to deep in an old forum thread, where someone
had posted a diagram of exactly what I was looking for.

~~~
thomasjoulin
Every time I see a link comparing search engines, I try them with hope, but
always go back to Google. My last search confirms this :

* Google [https://www.google.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bu...](https://www.google.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug) * [http://www.bing.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug&#...</a> * <a href="http://duckduckgo.com/?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug" rel="nofollow">http://duckduckgo.com/?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug</a>

~~~
korr
So, five results at the top from StackOverflow... Why not just skip the search
engine middle man and go straight to StackOverflow?

~~~
BitMastro
Because you still don't know if StackOverflow will have the result you're
looking for

~~~
saalweachter
I've seen this in shopping results -- I'm probably going to buy from Amazon,
but I like to see the top N competitors' results along side the Amazon
results, so that I can easily confirm that no one is more than a buck or two
cheaper than Amazon and can then feel good about my purchase.

------
esolyt
I did a comparison by actually searching the same phrases on google.com/ncr
with Incognito. The actual Google results are much better than the Google
results on this page.

Search for "Hunger Games" on Google returns the IMDB page as the first result,
which is exactly what I want. But neither panes on the Bing's test has the
IMDB page as the first result.

------
ch0wn
5-0 for Google. I tried mostly programming related queries as I find the
differences most noticeable there. Especially when searching for specific APIs
or objects, Bing tends to give you just the project homepage and some
unrelated pages, while Google gives you the actual deep link.

------
timothya
I remember a while back when Bing was shown pretty conclusively to be taking
Google results.

So I wonder if this test is really "Google vs. Bing + Google".

EDIT: Source - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165469>

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Last time I checked, it looked like Bing was still using clicks on Google
search results as a signal in Bing's rankings.

~~~
MarkMc
Matt - do Google's terms of use allow users to send the results page
clickstream to Microsoft? If not, aren't there legal avenues you could pursue?

~~~
option_greek
I don't think we need any more litigation and definitely not in search. Google
search wins by pure accuracy of their results. They should be proud of it and
just ignore scavengers.

------
michaelcampbell
The very fact that this site exist says something. To me there's a weird
feeling of desperation about it.

~~~
corin_
Not at all, it's an often used marketing technique, generally by an underdog
(even if only a slight underdog) to try and pull in customers who would
actually like their product better if they had tried it.

The most famous example would be The Pepsi Challenge [1], but it happens all
the time, for example AMD have done it at a few events comparing an AMD
machine to a similar spec/price Intel build.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge>

------
rogerbinns
BTW it is best to use Incognito mode.

In my case Bing won 1 out 5 of the rounds. I used searches I had done recently
that hadn't given satisfactory results on Google.

In any event Microsoft now at least has searches it can work with and improve.
I can't imagine any other way they could get Google users to provide search
data.

------
hk__2
The study results are not very accurate. They made it with only 1000 US random
users, and ~60% chose Bing more often, ~30% chose Google more often (on 10
queries).

See the following fictive example:

1000 people, 600 have the following score: 4 Bing, 3 Google, 3 Draw; 400 have
the following score: 10 Google. So, in my example, 60% of the people chose
Bing more often and 40% chose Google more often. But, if you look at queries
numbers, Google was chosen for 3 _600+10_ 400=5800 queries, and Bing for
4*600=2400 queries, that's a 2:1 ratio, but in favor of Google.

~~~
hk__2
oops, the two '*' characters were interpreted as Markdown. So, the operation
is “3×600+10×400=5800”.

------
parfe
>Bing services aren't available right now

After 5 searches the screen greyed out and was unresponsive.

Guess Google wins by disqualification?

~~~
sgricci
Same here.

------
wickedchicken
Much easier to use blekko's 3-engine monte, since it strips formatting that
might give away the source engine. Just add /monte at the end of a query:

<http://blekko.com/ws/hunger+games+/monte>

~~~
tree_of_item
>We're Sorry, Google has banned us from retrieving results from them for now

------
niyazpk
This is not a real blind test though. (Pardon me for being a web developer,
but) I can tell which is which by just looking at the green colors used in the
links. The green in Google results is a little bit more saturated than the one
in Bing.

Google results also seems to show share counts from Google+ as in: _73,352
people +1'd this_

------
tucson
1\. survey is organized by Microsoft, 2. I think the survey is skewed because
typically when you go there you don't have anything specific in mind to search
so you type one-word query (they even propose them!) and one-word queries are
hard for google

------
crazypyro
I had two different runs that both ended 3-2 for Google. Even if Bing came out
ahead, they seem so similar that I couldn't be bothered to retrain myself to
bing stuff, instead of googling it, especially when I have gmail accounts.

------
islon
Nice try Microsoft. But if you really need to create a contest to prove your
search engine is better you're probably desperate.

~~~
eli
Sure, it's a PR campaign, but it's built around proving to you the actual
benefits of using the product. Seems pretty clever to me.

You would rather they blanket the city in ads on bus shelters? Or give away
$1,000 a day to a random Bing searcher?

~~~
btilly
It was clever when Pepsi did it to try to let people know that they couldn't
tell the difference between pepsi and coke.

Now? Obvious.

------
jaimefjorge
The 'pepsi challenge' of search engines?

Tip: try to search for plot lines in movies such as: 'kid that is able to see
people already dead'

------
Achshar
I was Google 5-0 but with technical queries whose results i did not know for
either bing or google but knew what pages should be on top. I think it is
actually deceiving. While choosing I was pretty sure two of them were bing.
Because one's default address for movie timings was Redmond and in other the
video results were all non-youtube. Something does not make sense. Either
google is ignoring youtube results and moved to Redmond or they (MSFT) changed
it so that people choose other result. (not many people would get the Redmond
reference though)

~~~
benmanns
It may be that Google uses location information from your IP address, which,
for the Microsoft servers running the competition, is in Redmond. If you
search "what is my ip address" in the competition, Google's results show "Your
public IP address is 131.253.25.46" (or something similar). This is a
Microsoft IP in Redmond. Interestingly, a reverse DNS query gives
msnbot-131-253-25-46.search.msn.com as a domain name for this IP.

~~~
Achshar
Well yes that does make a lot of sense. Kind of stupid of me to not realize
this myself.

------
B-Con
5/5 Google. Two technical queries, three more average ones.

But I could tell which side had which search results in 2 or 3 of the tests,
so I can't claim complete blindness in the test. I tried to be impartial,
though.

------
bilal11
Bing you fool but not we :) it is definite we use google search engine
everyday and what search term we will use in this contest is more likely the
term we already use to search frequently let say "Design" and almost know the
top ten search results of google. So when bing produces couple of different
search results people will give definitely give first 2 or 3 clicks to bing
just for the sake of change but for long term user most important and refined
results belong to Google we know :D

------
debacle
I wound up with 3/1/1 in favor of Bing. I sort of felt like I was choosing the
Bing options, but Google still hasn't given me a real reason to switch.

MS has definitely caught up quite a bit, though.

------
ajays
Google 5-0

Google's strength is not in searching for head or torso terms like "facebook"
or "2013 calendar". It is in searching out tail terms; those obscure terms
which might include a typo or two, and the phrasing may not be correct.

Unfortunately (and I don't have much time to explain this) one simply _can
not_ judge a search engine's comparative performance using random users. And
the Bing guys are falling into that trap.

EDIT: To expand more on what I wanted to write.

// DISCLAIMER: This is my personal view, and has nothing to do with my
employer.

There are 3 large (fuzzy) classes of queries on search engines: head, torso
and tail. The head queries are small in number but large in volume: queries
like "Facebook", "Google", "Yahoo", etc. (yes, people do 'search' for these on
search engines. Just a handful of such queries may make up 10% of the entire
search engine traffic, which would be 100M queries per day (or so) on Google.
It is depressing to see the numbers). In general, any search engine worth its
salt will get the head queries right.

The torso is basically deciles 2-6 or so (there's no hard and fast
definition). Here you'd have most musicians, actors, popular restaurants, etc.
Bing and Google both would do a mostly adequate job here, for the first
result. But: if you want to explore the concept a little, Bing goes astray and
Google does not. For example, search for "idle hand tattoo" on
<http://bingiton.com/> . The first result is the same, to my local tattoo
parlor. But the second result on Bing is from Mesa, AZ; while Google sticks
with the right result and offers up other, related sites (Yelp, etc.). Google
knows that "Hand" in the title is not the same as "Hands", and gives me not
only the store, but also their Yelp, FB and Twitter pages; in other words:
Google _understands_ your query better.

And finally, the tail. Here we have obscure error codes, weird technical
terms, etc.; most of which are seen maybe once or twice a day. These
constitute the bottom ~30% of the query stream. This is where Google really
shines. It is very rare indeed to look for an obscure term and find that Bing
does a better job than Google (I have yet to find an example).

So, as a user, I have a choice of 2 search engines; and one of them I know
will do a better job on obscure terms. Guess which one will I pick?

When Bing claims that "most people prefer Bing in our user studies" (or
something similar), their conclusion is flawed because the study itself is
flawed. You can't sit a person down in front of a computer and ask him to
evaluate your performance on tail queries! Where are those tail queries coming
from? If they are provided by Bing ("here's an obscure term, search for it and
tell us what you think"), then the user has no way to evaluate how relevant
the results are, because, by definition, it's an obscure term! On the other
hand, if you ask the user to come up with an obscure term, it will most likely
be a term they are familiar with and they'll already know the answer, so they
won't really hunt for information. So in my "idle hand tattoo" example,
they'll see the top result and claim satisfaction; when, in real life, I would
like to see the Yelp reviews, maps, etc. for the place.

If they (Bing) really want to compare how well they're doing, here's a
suggestion: setup a search engine (like bingiton, but with only 1 pane of
results, and neutral branding), and make it the default for a large pool of
users (with their permission). Randomly, switch the backend to Bing or Google.
Then, monitor the heck out of what the users do (all with their permission):
how often do they click on the first result, how often do they re-formulate
queries, the time to the first click, how often do they quickly come back to
the results page from a bad click, etc. etc. etc.

~~~
tallanvor
It doesn't surprise me at all that Google tends to handle the long tail
questions better. --They're much larger and have had many more years to
collect data, build synonym dictionaries, etc.

When I tried to come up with obscure queries, Google does better at the
technical queries, and Bing is doing better at the non-technical queries. But
the technical queries usually weren't _that_ far off.

~~~
pooriaazimi
Yes, they're much larger, bot not much older. Microsoft was in search business
_years_ before Bing, and I also think they now have Yahoo!'s dataset too.

They're just _better_ in search. I generally dislike Google (because I don't
like their business model, which is advertising [I don't care for privacy
much, just hate ads]), but _nothing_ is as good as them in search, nor could
be (for the foreseeable future).

------
luser001
This comment is quite late. Hopefully somebody at Microsoft will see this.

I used Bing for several months. I actually found it indistinguishable from
Google except for linux howto questions (Google seems to understand forum
websites better).

The dealbreaker for me was lack of SSL support. Switched back to Google.

Nobody who uses Google regularly will switch to Bing: not enough of an
advantage. But people who start out with Bing may never switch. That's the
long-term game Microsoft has to play.

------
freehunter
I ended up with a draw the two times I tried. I made the mistake of trying a
Google search I had just done previously and ended up seeing the purple links,
which tipped me off to which was which. Bing was the only one that gave me
local and mapped results for "Chicago Loop pizza", but Google won out just as
often.

Bing is as good as Google on average. The problem is, when you're up against
an entrenched competitor, good enough just isn't good enough.

------
yock
3/2 in favor of Google. I was surprised by how similar the results were, and
by what I apparently considered important about search results.

------
ck2
I have this theory Microsoft keeps funding bing as a tax writeoff.

I've yet to see a website where the search referrals are even within 30 points
of Google.

------
jaimefjorge
"we can make him better we have the technology"

How about we build a community test? We could make a little page showing the
results for various search engines (e.g. google, bing, blekko, duckduckgo) and
and put them to a similar test. We could open and show the data collected in
real time so the community gains from the experience.

Immediately there is a problem: how to get the results.

Naively we could use iframes to show the pages for each results. But it is not
possible.

We could use their APIs to get the results and show them. However these are
limited to N calls on their free package. That would make the survey limited.

Another way is to screenshot the page (fetched using a simple browser call)
and present it. This, however, should also be paid for more than N calls..

Anyway, after resolving this, we should be go to go.

We could gather data in an unbiased way and present it to the world.

This is simple to make, I think. Upvotes if you think it is a good idea (for
this to be a join effort probably).

------
k-mcgrady
I selected one draw and then Google every other time. It was close for most
searches but Google was slightly better. Google seems to be better at more
detailed searches whereas Bing is better at searching for broader things (like
they suggest 'wedding dress', 'chicken nuggets' etc.).

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iaskwhy
4 for Google and a draw. Google is still way ahead using my mother language
(which is not English).

~~~
dagw
I found exactly the same thing. Searching in English gave me mostly draws.
Searching in Swedish and Google crushed Bing at least 4-1 every time.

------
AlisdairO
3-1 in favour of google for me.

I suspect a lot of this may be down to how challenging the queries are that
people put in. Bing's historically been great at generic searches, but I made
a point of looking for more difficult stuff, where google has (for me) always
been better.

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humbledrone
I found that I was not able to take the test fairly, because it was blatantly
obvious from the style of the search results which one was Bing and which one
was Google. The Bing results use a slightly duller green for the URL displayed
underneath each result's title, among other stylistic differences.

So, the comparison is completely useless, as they did not anonymize the style
of the results, and thus either conscious or unconscious bias can creep in. I
expect that for users that are not aware that the results look different,
there will be a significant preference for the results that they see every day
(e.g. the engine they normally use).

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omaranto
I got Google 5 - Bing 0. I did 3 math related searches, 1 math graduate
student by name and 1 search about a python math library. Looks like I'll only
switch to Bing if I leave math, which is not very likely. ;)

------
manku_timma
5-0 in favour of google. I was quite surprised too since I used fairly generic
queries that I thought Bing would do as well as google. \- whats on in london
\- ready player one \- bash history across sessions

------
ecaron
Anyone else seeing different results on this vs. what Blekko's monte (e.g.
<http://blekko.com/ws/your+phrase+/monte>) produces?

------
prezjordan
Google 4, Draw 1. Did not pick Bing results once. Methinks their "blind trial"
only applies to queries Microsoft specifically gave the testers to make Bing
results shine.

------
noamsml
Using five technical searches I might actually make on a day by day basis, I
chose Google 4 times and a draw once, though the results were close almost
every time (once I chose Google because I searched for an organization name
and wanted their homepage first rather than relevant news, and twice because
the relevant result was from MDN rather than MSDN or W3C since I found that
MDN tends to be the best site for actual technical reference, so YMMV).

------
Loic
I am surprised how close the results are in my case. It was often really hard
to say this one or this one. Near "draw" for most of them. Trying the Blekko
"/monte" way as proposed here it was 50/50 Bing/Google (a bit more than 5
tests).

I am not going to switch yet, but this is good news, the gap is closing and
maybe, like we had an IE monopoly, we are going to move slowly in direction of
more search engines.

------
kstop
Google for 4, drawn on 1. I like that the blurb at the end was all "whatever,
we're still better says a survey". Marketing failure ahoy!

------
darrenkopp
Google 3:2, although the problem with this is that I can always tell which one
was google and which was bing based on the formatting.

------
gjm11
Apparently like most other people here who tried it, I found that Google won
conclusively for me (4.5-0.5), though in each test it won by only a small
margin.

My queries: one software-technical python virtual machine, one philosophical
argument from evil, one highbrow musical/artistic (this one was the draw), one
engineering-technical, one geeky-popular cultural.

------
scottw
Given the results of this group (I was 3 for google, 2 draw), I wonder if
Google simply has a stronger technical bias than Bing.

------
riyadparvez
Google always worked for me whatever the result is. Their default queries are
just ridiculous and cherry-picked.

------
S4M
Something is wrong, because I chose 'draw' twice, but apparently I prefered
bing over google 4 times out of 5.

------
antihero
The CSS gives it away. Bing has slightly different coloured links so you can
see it quite obviously.

------
wcchandler
I'm the obvious exception who's skewing the average but Bing won 4-1. I found
their color palette much easier on my eyes, and when half the results were
"draw," I sided with Bing, simply because I would prefer the presentation of
their results.

------
nrj
Appears to be broken in Chrome on OS X. After my 5th choice I'm stuck on a
gray screen.

------
vnuk
Broken for me, after choosing first round winner both panels get darker and
nothing happens...

FF15

------
taytus
Google 4-1. No surprises here.

------
boombasket
5-0 for Google.

This was made by Microsoft??

------
MatthewPhillips
I did all JavaScript searches and knew which were Bing. Do a search for:
array.prototype.filter. The Google result gives you MDN, the Bing result gives
you MSDN.

------
brittohalloran
Google 4-1. Backfire

------
alanbyrne
"Bing won 1 rounds"

What bothers me most about this is that the programmers didn't bother to
remove the S from "rounds" when the result was singular... sloppy.

------
getpost
Google 4, Bing 1, but I mostly use DuckDuckGo. But Google is unmatched for
geographic terms, so I override with !gmaps

------
PaulHoule
they both suck -- for 3 out 5 queries I tried they both return spammy junk or
non-helpful shopping links

~~~
madoublet
Man, I completely agree. Both Google and Bing are completely and utterly
broken. Both return about.com and ask.yahoo.com and a number of other sites
that have been specifically built to game the system. Does anyone else
remember when you could search Google and it would return academic
institutions and actual interesting blog posts from individuals? It has been a
long time.

When your system can be gamed, it is broken. Period.

------
wildmXranat
3-2 Bing. The results can be easily linked to one of the search engines so the
outcome can be skewed.

------
riyadparvez
I've noticed, 1st result displayed on their search didn't match mine. Nice
try, M$

------
Tonester
Google 4-1 for me

------
rome
2 Draws, 1 Google 2 Bings for me.

------
joering2
the 2-way layout reminds me when I wanted to do the same thing, and combine
search result into one (of course removing dups). Ended up with making google
gui into bing results of now defunct binngle.com (due to MS charging for their
api access)

------
ramy_d
I would like to see "live" results to help corroborate their claim.

------
Evbn
The only one Bing one at was when they suppressed Google Shopping but showed
Bing Shopping. I get that they think it is fair to hide ads, but Google ads
are highly competitive with organic Bing.

They also suppressed the Knowledge Graph box.

