Google vs Bing
Recently there has been an ad by Microsoft Bing that frequently appear on the Internet in which it compares the search results of Google and Bing and claimed that 2/3 of the people think Bing produces better search results than Google. I became very curious about their claim and tried the experiment on bingiton.com. Although I still favor Google’s search results, it’s apparent that Bing utilizes a different search and ranking algorithm than Google’s pageRank to do search and ranking. After doing some research, I found that Bing utilizes a ranking algorithm called fastRank together with many other algorithms to produce their search results.
Search Quality Insights: Behind the Bing It On Challenge:
Search Quality Insights: Whole Page Relevance:
Reducing Junk:
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/03/19/bsqa-reducing-junk.aspx
To Error is Human:
Answer Defects:
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/08/20/answerdefects.aspx
After reading these articles, I start to have a vague idea about how Bing is improving their search and ranking algorithm. The ranking algorithm we talked in class is a very primitive one and apparently both Google and Bing use many other criteria and parameters to adjust the search results. Both companies are very secretive about their algorithm and I can’t tell how different they are, but from my perspective, I still think that Google is doing a better job at search and ranking.
If you try to search “how to kill yourself” in Google, the first thing that pops up is the contact information of National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Also, after you type “how to kill” in Google, it never auto-completes it to “how to kill yourself”. In Bing, however, its first auto-completion is “how to kill yourself” and never shows the help phone number as Google does. This is just a very special example of how different their search results are but it shows how thorough and complete the search algorithms are.
There are many special cases that need extra attention when implementing the search and ranking algorithm and I think what makes Google better is how they take care of these circumstances.