In my first impressions of Google vs. Bing, I outlined how both services felt in terms of quickie head to head.
Since then, I’ve had time to use both services at length and both have their strengths and weaknesses.
If you want to know specific facts like the capital of Australia or the population of Germany or information on a particular person, Bing has an edge. But in terms of getting to raw information quickly, Google wins by quite a bit. That is, if I’m actually searching to accumulate knowledge on a particular subject, Google is significantly better.
So why is that?
Well, first, I think that Google does a lot better in thwarting cheese tactics some use to get higher search rankings. So spammers and merchants that purposely link to a particular article on one of their sites from multiple domains will tend to do better on Bing than Google.
Secondly, it just seems like Google has a lot more “stuff” in its archives. Its spiders seem to be indexing a lot more than Bing’s spiders and of course, Google’s been doing it a lot longer so it tends to have in its archives things that are no longer actively linked to.
I wish I could combine the two together. Though, until Bing gets rid of the tacky wallpaper background it uses, I will probably stick with Google as my main search engine even if everything else is equal.
