Bing Beats Google On Search Effectiveness | Hacker News Reader

Bing Beats Google On Search Effectiveness

informationweek.com

22 pointsIrene19 comments

I'd say this is largely due to the type of searches people are doing, as well as (as some people mentioned) many finding the needed info in the blurb or instant page of the site. For developers like us, we probably often Google a very difficult programming question. Others Google random questions or phrases as well, hoping Google gives the answer. Often, we don't find what we're looking for, so we don't click on anything. I'd say a large part of those searching in Bing are doing much simpler searches, leading to easier found results. Those who really want to scour the web for a difficult-to-find answer more commonly use Google than Bing, so they more commonly can't find the answer.

I agree that the 80/20 rule probably applies to this situation.

Novice users (a larger percentage of Bing/Yahoo users) have more simple queries and are more likely to click poor results.

Tech Savvy users (which Google owns the lion's share of) will have more queries, more complex queries, will have a better sense of their goal in mind and will iterate queries, and are more likely to leverage search features like definition and calculator queries.

Also, Google is a bigger target than Bing for the content farmers. Bing has fewer gray hats gaming its algorithms, so Bing's results will include a greater proportion of naturally-occurring content and less of ad farms.

It's like comparing the security of say Ubuntu and BeOS by the number of vulnerabilities reported. Ubuntu has more, but that's a function of visibility and aggregate effort, not so much the inherent quality of each.

Bing and Yahoo yield higher "percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website". I often use google's built-in calculator, flight status and definition queries. This means I am "finding relevant information" without finding a website. Does it make google less efficient? I do not think so.

Also, I frequently find the information I'm looking for in the blurb from the website and so don't bother to click through. (Or I view the cached version.)

Even better, sometimes google instant answers my question before I even see search results.

Bing also has a built-in calculator, flight status, and definition queries. I'm not sure there's any data that suggests whether or not it is used more or less often from Google or Bing.

This was my first thought too, but I would guess that normal searches make up >95% of searches (averaged over the mostly non-technical population). So I don't think this can explain the discrepancy.

Could use some good data.

There's hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year with people trying to game the system and show up higher in google search results. With the amount of money spent there, it's no wonder that some (a lot of?) worthless results show up. Bing benefits most from not being Google. It's the classic security by obscurity.

Is there any word on how Google instant search impacts this number? That by itself could account for the large discrepancy.

And what about map queries? Do those get counted as queries without successful clicks?

Instant search shouldn't impact clickthrough on links. It could effect the length of queries though (making queries shorter on average for Google).

It would, as you make a lot of instant queries with no clickthroughs before you end up typing your full query.

Oh, I see. You're saying each instant query would count as a query, rather than the instant query "session". That makes sense.

Here's the source of the data:

http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/experi...

This article doesn't say anything, as much as it tries to. Without considering the different populations that use each search engine, the numbers are meaningless. Get back to me when they do some proper normalization.

I'm not surprised. I've been getting fed up with Google more and more regarding search. I still don't use Bing as much, but it seems nicer to use than Google.

While I'm a huge fan of Google, I'm glad other companies are challenging them. After all, competition leads to innovation.

Isn't "the percentage of search queries that result in a visit to a website" a bogus measure of success? I find myself having to follow more Bing links because the captions are irrelevant sections of the website.

Every time I want to use Bing for some advanced searches, I'm lost. Like if I want to find something within the last 24 hours, how do you do it?

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