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Comment by Sindisil | Hacker News Reader

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?

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This is the thing for me.

Of course it's going to be a draw for most searches (especially the suggested ones: "math games", "coupons", "time zones"...), they're generic and easy to find.

You can use any search engine you want to find those things. Shoot, even AltaVista was good at those kinds of searches, and that was 10 years ago.

The ones I care about—even if I'm not a programmer or technical user—are the difficult searches. What if I need to find a specific car part that only ever existed in the 1972 Ford Pinto? What if I want to find a plumber who specializes in pre-20th-century homes? What if, what if, what if.

I used searches like that and more in this comparison, and it was 100% Google. I could even tell easily why it was Google, and it was pretty clear which one it was. I still chose Google (despite being basically unblinded) because it was fundamentally better at these specific searches.

That's what bing needs to compare. But will they show it? Of course not.

Edit: I did 5 more searches all non-technical but specific and picked only based on result quality. Again 5/5 google. (for those curious, the searches were: "lego mindstorms", "Mars curiosity hi-res", "home developments in myrtle beach", "used bookstores in portland, or", "top baby names in 1982"—the last one was very cool because Google also provided links to the 5 surrounding years right below the 1982 result. It's the little things you know...)

I went 4 to 1 google as well. My searches weren't technical, my name, my job, my hobbies, etc.

I got 3 for Google. The results are surprisingly similar to pick a winner. Probably because I chose some easy searches (Mr. President, person name, place).

Google, 3 to 1.

All searches were related to pages I know and I searched for some keywords or parts of the domain.

Google, 2 to 0

Here's what I searched for -

-my name (Google, I chose Google because it gave more of my results, which may not be fair.)

-extract articles from websites (Google, in this search google's result were much better.)

-python ide for mac (Draw)

-new york time (Draw)

-glusterfs (Draw)

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

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.

I got Bing with 2-0 with 4 draws. I used 1 technical keyword and 1 "normal people" keyword in spanish. It was really tied though, most results were different but pretty relevant, very hard for me to pick a winner.

Google 5:0

3-2 Google. 3 technical searches all went to Google. 2 popular culture searches went to Bing. Interesting.

Google 5 to 0

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