Maybe I was imagining it, but four out of the five I did I felt I knew which was Google and which was Bing - not from doing searches that I would recognise, but just from the extra non-search information / lay-out.
I did my best to still pick without bias to my current search engine (Google) but ended up picking them 5/5 and Bing 0 times.
There is nothing "weird" about blind "taste" tests. It's a good way to attempt to filter out at least a little bias, and here you have two competing products that do the same thing (unless your baseline assumption is that no one could ever compete with the current leader).
Not at all, it's an often used marketing technique, generally by an underdog (even if only a slight underdog) to try and pull in customers who would actually like their product better if they had tried it.
The most famous example would be The Pepsi Challenge [1], but it happens all the time, for example AMD have done it at a few events comparing an AMD machine to a similar spec/price Intel build.
Bing seems to be a bit better at generic, broad searches (games, file extension $something, etc) and Google seems to be better at exact, specific queries (stop error 7B, RPGs announced at PAX 2012).
Bing ended up winning, which shocked the hell out of me, but after trying a couple more times, I noticed that pattern.
DuckDuckGo is now a hundred times better than Google for those exact & specific queries. I was looking for some info on my truck engine, and Google sent me to sales pages for completely unrelated parts (and sometimes, entirely unrelated cars!). DDG sent me to deep in an old forum thread, where someone had posted a diagram of exactly what I was looking for.
I've seen this in shopping results -- I'm probably going to buy from Amazon, but I like to see the top N competitors' results along side the Amazon results, so that I can easily confirm that no one is more than a buck or two cheaper than Amazon and can then feel good about my purchase.
I ended up with a draw the two times I tried. I made the mistake of trying a Google search I had just done previously and ended up seeing the purple links, which tipped me off to which was which. Bing was the only one that gave me local and mapped results for "Chicago Loop pizza", but Google won out just as often.
Bing is as good as Google on average. The problem is, when you're up against an entrenched competitor, good enough just isn't good enough.
This is not a real blind test though. (Pardon me for being a web developer, but) I can tell which is which by just looking at the green colors used in the links. The green in Google results is a little bit more saturated than the one in Bing.
Google results also seems to show share counts from Google+ as in: 73,352 people +1'd this
I had two different runs that both ended 3-2 for Google. Even if Bing came out ahead, they seem so similar that I couldn't be bothered to retrain myself to bing stuff, instead of googling it, especially when I have gmail accounts.
Ended up picking google 4-1. I'm somewhat of a bing fan in the sense that I find them good enough for most searches. So I was a bit surprised that the results ended up skewing in google's favor ... guess that kind of backfired for them :-P
5-0 in favor of Google for me. 3 of my queries had 5 words, one had 4, and one had 2. Bing is almost as good at solving the easy short ones, while Google can solve even the long queries.
I got a draw and then a 5-0 for Google. A couple of result for Bing were weird, like displaying "Seattle" when I searched for "a" (the letter), NSFW images when I was searching for a novel ("accelerando"). Google knowledge graph it's just too much ahead ("age of mcgyver") and it has better results on maps and evaluating expressions.
Accelerando is a relatively well-known adult manga (also made into an anime) that, IIRC, has also been around longer than cstross' novel, so NSFW images are not an unreasonable answer to that query.
the 2-way layout reminds me when I wanted to do the same thing, and combine search result into one (of course removing dups). Ended up with making google gui into bing results of now defunct binngle.com (due to MS charging for their api access)
1. survey is organized by Microsoft, 2. I think the survey is skewed because typically when you go there you don't have anything specific in mind to search so you type one-word query (they even propose them!) and one-word queries are hard for google
I did a comparison by actually searching the same phrases on google.com/ncr with Incognito. The actual Google results are much better than the Google results on this page.
Search for "Hunger Games" on Google returns the IMDB page as the first result, which is exactly what I want. But neither panes on the Bing's test has the IMDB page as the first result.
Interesting. The privacy implications are disturbing if true. I'm neither an IE nor windows user but I suspect most users wouldn't opt-in if given that choice. Any refs to research/evidence about the topic would be appreciated.
"When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information. ... Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included. For example, if you visited the Microsoft.com search website at http://search.microsoft.com and entered "Seattle" as the search term, the full address http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=Seattle&qsc0=... will be sent."
Most people have little idea that allowing a feature called "Suggested Sites" will result in their Google searches and clicks being sent to Microsoft, or that Microsoft will use clicks on Google search results in Bing's ranking.
MSFT also uses something called the Microsoft CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program), and I think that's either opt-out already or they're making it opt-out in Windows 8--it's built into the "Use Express Settings," I believe.
Again, I haven't looked at this very recently, but if you're using a recent version of Windows and IE, you're probably sending your searches and clicks to Microsoft unless you've been very careful about how you configured your computer.
Agreed about "most people have little idea...". I wish more companies were more honest and open about these things instead of burying it in the fine print. I wonder what would happen if you enable "Suggested Sites" but then install IE 9+ (since it appears to support the DNT flag) and select "Do Not Track". The pessimist in me suspects it will just turn off tracking for all non-msft experiments.
In any case, I think you've convinced me that my decision to use a non-windows OS and a non-IE browser was the correct one.
For the longest time, I didn't even realize that clicking a Google result sent the click back to Google (I just didn't think about it).
Then I right clicked one of the results one day and did "copy link" since I wanted to send it to a friend, and got something like this (with a bunch of other stuff in it too that I've yanked out cause I have no idea if any of it would be identifying info, but the end result is that this link no longer works):
I just hadn't thought about it before. It makes sense that they want and use that info, but it wasn't obvious at all that they were collecting it in that way, since the address shown in the status bar is the destination site, not the actual link target. I had just always assumed that the results were based on links and such around the web, and didn't think clicks would be factored in.
I don't think we need any more litigation and definitely not in search. Google search wins by pure accuracy of their results. They should be proud of it and just ignore scavengers.
5-0 for Google. I tried mostly programming related queries as I find the differences most noticeable there. Especially when searching for specific APIs or objects, Bing tends to give you just the project homepage and some unrelated pages, while Google gives you the actual deep link.
I suspect a lot of this may be down to how challenging the queries are that people put in. Bing's historically been great at generic searches, but I made a point of looking for more difficult stuff, where google has (for me) always been better.
I selected one draw and then Google every other time. It was close for most searches but Google was slightly better. Google seems to be better at more detailed searches whereas Bing is better at searching for broader things (like they suggest 'wedding dress', 'chicken nuggets' etc.).
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadI did my best to still pick without bias to my current search engine (Google) but ended up picking them 5/5 and Bing 0 times.
The most famous example would be The Pepsi Challenge [1], but it happens all the time, for example AMD have done it at a few events comparing an AMD machine to a similar spec/price Intel build.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge
Bing ended up winning, which shocked the hell out of me, but after trying a couple more times, I noticed that pattern.
Whether to get the job done, to get some certain information or something third.
* Google https://www.google.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bu... * http://www.bing.com/search?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug&#... * http://duckduckgo.com/?q=insertObject+atIndex+zero+bug
Bing is as good as Google on average. The problem is, when you're up against an entrenched competitor, good enough just isn't good enough.
You would rather they blanket the city in ads on bus shelters? Or give away $1,000 a day to a random Bing searcher?
Now? Obvious.
Google results also seems to show share counts from Google+ as in: 73,352 people +1'd this
MS has definitely caught up quite a bit, though.
Tip: try to search for plot lines in movies such as: 'kid that is able to see people already dead'
Search for "Hunger Games" on Google returns the IMDB page as the first result, which is exactly what I want. But neither panes on the Bing's test has the IMDB page as the first result.
So I wonder if this test is really "Google vs. Bing + Google".
EDIT: Source - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2165469
Seems it is opt-in users.
"When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with standard computer information. ... Information associated with the web address, such as search terms or data you entered in forms might be included. For example, if you visited the Microsoft.com search website at http://search.microsoft.com and entered "Seattle" as the search term, the full address http://search.microsoft.com/results.aspx?q=Seattle&qsc0=... will be sent."
Most people have little idea that allowing a feature called "Suggested Sites" will result in their Google searches and clicks being sent to Microsoft, or that Microsoft will use clicks on Google search results in Bing's ranking.
MSFT also uses something called the Microsoft CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program), and I think that's either opt-out already or they're making it opt-out in Windows 8--it's built into the "Use Express Settings," I believe.
Again, I haven't looked at this very recently, but if you're using a recent version of Windows and IE, you're probably sending your searches and clicks to Microsoft unless you've been very careful about how you configured your computer.
In any case, I think you've convinced me that my decision to use a non-windows OS and a non-IE browser was the correct one.
Thanks for mentioning this...
Then I right clicked one of the results one day and did "copy link" since I wanted to send it to a friend, and got something like this (with a bunch of other stuff in it too that I've yanked out cause I have no idea if any of it would be identifying info, but the end result is that this link no longer works):
http://www.google.com/url?&source=web&url=http%3A%2F...
I just hadn't thought about it before. It makes sense that they want and use that info, but it wasn't obvious at all that they were collecting it in that way, since the address shown in the status bar is the destination site, not the actual link target. I had just always assumed that the results were based on links and such around the web, and didn't think clicks would be factored in.
I suspect a lot of this may be down to how challenging the queries are that people put in. Bing's historically been great at generic searches, but I made a point of looking for more difficult stuff, where google has (for me) always been better.