Competition between Search Engines
Looking at different types of crawler based search engines, it is interesting to note how many people have a preference for a specific search engine. Why is it that some people prefer Google to Bing or Yahoo, or vice versa? This boils down to the basics of how a crawler based search engine operates. Crawler based web engines use crawlers to visit websites and explore the links from that website. Everything the crawler discovers then gets indexed. Every time changes are made to a web page, this index is updated each time the crawler revisits the page. Lastly the search engine software ranks the indexed pages according to its page ranking algorithm to sort the links in order of relevance.
While many people believe that Google is comparatively the better option when it comes to trusting the results that search engines produce, objectively looking at what makes a search engine “better” might not lead many to think so.
When it comes to producing relevant links including named entities (specific people, places or things), Google might be at the top of the list because of its acquisition of Metaweb. Metaweb is a company recently acquired by Google, and they’ve created a system of indexing named entities that allow you to search for information in a new way. However, Bing’s video search option is significantly superior to that of Google, allowing people to watch video links without leaving the Bing web page, and even showing previews when hovering over the link. Google and Bing operate almost identically when it comes to advanced search operators. However, Google’s reverse image search and voice search add to its charm. Bing however provides eight autocomplete suggestions whereas google only gives four. When it comes to the actual search results that these engines produce, it is a quite a close call with general searches. However, the more technical a search query gets, the better Google seems to perform. This can be tied to the fact that Google’s indexing speeds are much higher than other search engines, with an index of more than one trillion links!
http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/07/google-gets-smarter-with-named-entities-acquires-metaweb/
https://lifehacker.com/search-engine-showdown-google-vs-bing-1739263052