RSSBing vs. Google face-off, round 1
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published June 1, 2009, 11:31 AM
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The best price on a 1 TB hard drive This is the kind of search that an amateur system builder might perform at any time: What's the best price and supplier for a one-terabyte internal hard drive?
Bing's prediction engine for queries in progress behaved in championship fashion here. The moment we typed "1 TB," it offered "1 TB hard drive" and "1 TB external hard drive" as possible completions. Choosing the first one brought up a page where 1 TB HDDs were mentioned, where Seagate perched atop the list with specifications of its Barracuda 7200.11. That's not exactly prices, but in fairness, that's not what we chose from the completion list.
Finding a price list in Bing is simple: There's a bold "Shopping" link along the left side navigation bar. When we click that, we get a well formatted list showing both internal and external drives (it's easy to tell which is which), sorted by "best match" -- the most likely entries to match this rather general query. Price is a clear and obvious sorting criterion here, and one click on that hoists the entry for the Barracuda 7200.12 to the top of the page, with at least one store asking (apparently) $54.
Not all entries are associated with user reviews, though the prominence of the feature now called Bing Cashback does give Bing an edge here, offering as much as 8% return for buying an HDD found on Bing. A click on this drive gives you a complete list of stores and prices (though we doubt the CompSource listing pricing the drive at $1,417.17 has been updated recently). So Bing takes the shopper through the complete decision process -- some online retailers will appreciate this, others won't. But it does provide a complete answer, and it'll be hard for Google to compete.
Google's predictor came to the same conclusion Bing's did about our query. Selecting "1 TB hard drive" took us to a page that presented some shopping results right up front -- Bing's hid them away behind the Shopping link. Clicking on "Shopping results for 1 TB hard drive" takes us to Google Product Search (formerly known as "Froogle," and we miss the old brand name), where once again we see a complete and relatively well formatted list of options. Changing the sort order to Price: low to high catapulted a Western Digital refurbished drive to the top of the list, at $68.42. Clicking on that entry takes us directly to the store making that offer.
What's missing here? Well, first of all, that wasn't the best price for a 1 TB hard drive, at least based on available data. There's no cashback offer (for folks looking for that extra $1.08), and instead of comparing stores that offer the same drive, we're jumping back and forth between different stores. Sure, we can proceed straight to Google Checkout with a number of these services, but we don't know enough about the drive and the prices and the stores yet to make that decision. Bing's service was a tad more complete in this department, so we're giving Bing the nod in heat #2. That ties the score at one-all.
What's going on in North Korea?
If you're a concerned citizen of the planet, you may be worried about some of the recent militaristic displays of audacity and pomposity coming from the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea. At the time of this writing, there's been some news hints about the possible test firing of a long-range missile theoretically capable of reaching the shores of Alaska. Now, a typical Internet user may go to a trusted news source directly for headlines -- frankly, that's probably what most folks online will do. But not all folks are "most folks," and some will use the tool in front of their face, first. That could be the Google Toolbar, and that could be Bing's new alternative.
Without performing any journalistic feat of its own, Google has already made a name for itself in news, by fast becoming the Internet's pre-eminent distributor of headlines. If I happen to type the query "North Korea" test, complete with quotation marks, into Google's main query line (not the Google News page), my search results begin with a collection of the first few headlines in Google's collection about North Korea's little escapades. Up front is "North Korea carries out two more weapons test," dateline five days ago, and linking to The Irish Times.
We have nothing against Ireland or The Irish Times. But if Google were to really put its alleged smarts to good use on this feature, including its good sense of geolocation, it should conclude 1) we're not in Ireland; 2) we're not asking about Ireland. All that notwithstanding, Google should also conclude that on a major news issue such as North Korea, a five-day-old article from anyplace is no longer newsworthy.
Did Bing fare any better? Giving it the same "North Korea" test query, at the very top of the first batch of news-related items at the top of the page was a headline dated one hour ago. One hour old versus five days old means it's newsworthy. Now, the source of the news is News.com.au (no relation to CNET), a pre-eminent Australian online news service. Again, the service could be smarter -- Australia may be closer to North Korea than Ireland, but it's still not really there.
Nonetheless, on this particular point, Bing did a bit better job -- a "C" compared to an "F" on newsworthiness. And that gives Bing the edge over Google at the end of Round 1, with the score Bing 2, Google 1. We're not through testing Google vs. Bing, and we'd like to get you involved. Give us some examples of some hard queries or research assignments, and we'll put these two search engines through their paces. For now, we're limiting our tests to Bing and Google -- Yahoo will just have to wait in the wings for now, maybe to take on the champion in a later match.
I just tried the same experiment done here with the 1 TB hard drive and google returned the $53 hard drive that they claimed google did not find but google had already added in shipping and tax, which is probably why it appeared to be more expensive. It also came right to the front with google shopping and with bing i got a whole bunch of hard drive enclosures which is not what i was searching for. I'm sure I could wade through all the nonsense results, but why would i do that? I can just use google.
The authors last search was borderline retarded. He start by saying we're going to search for north korea's missile testing and then you go and search for "North Korea" test. Excuse me if I'm missing something here but shouldn't they have searched for north korea missile test? Also, why would the author put quotes around north korea? That is useless for a phrase so common. ALSO, ahem, the author says they used the toolbars to find this which is the same thing as using the normal search engine. I guess they don't bother to realize that just using the regular search engine is not the best way to find up to date news. Its for finding the most relevant and useful information. If you want the newest info, just click on 'news' and search there. The author CLEARLY does not understand how to use search engines.
Score: 0
|try etihad airways. or cislabs australia or msy or sapphire processor...Google simply performs. Bing feels like a stale cake waiting to be disposed. Till it "betters" itself. I'll sleep on it.
Score: -1
|I was searching for "Exotic Collision" near Bellevue, WA (yes - I am a Microsoftie). The first result on Bing blew me away - all the information I needed was right there, with a one-click access to directions!
Score: 0
|You should all go BING yourselves.
I am loving it. It gets stronger by the day.
Score: 1
|As soon as I started reading this article, I knew the outcome. Google fanboys are as bad as Apple fanboys... I use to use Google but switched to Live Search since it had better results... I've been using BING and so far it surpasses Google and Yahoo Search. Just the name "BING" is geniouse... I'm loving BING and especially loving the name... What the hell is a GOOGLE anyway, it sounds like the sound baby's make?
Score: 1
|In mathematics, a "google" is the term used for the number One (1) with a hundred zeros in front of it.
If you can imagine the actual astronomical size of that number, and then connect it to a search engine which often returns hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of results for your search query, you'll agree it's not hard to see what a brilliant example of branding the name "Google" really is.
Score: 0
|Wrong. Googol is what you said. Google is an (intentional) misspelling of it. Oh, and the zeros are *after* the 1, not before.
Score: 1
|It's too bad that Google management killed the Froogle name..it was playful and good marketing (though admittedly harder to translate, which may be the real reason they killed it).
Score: -1
|i have utilized live search with little complaint, other than there have been times that it could not produce "any" or "little" results at times.
google and ask proved to be useful otherwise.
just becuase live has been repackaged and called to bing, doesn't make it any better.
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unfortunately for google and others, microsoft has integrated their search engine into the i.e. browser in several places in addition to the default msn homepage.
perhaps, another marketing falacy is that just because there are several ways to "bing" doesn't make it anymore better, just manipulative.
Score: -2
|Except the '1 Tb' drive mentioned in the article is actually a 500 Gb.
ST3 500
Score: 1
|I've tried bing out a little bit today, and I have to say--I've been pleasently surprised with it. It pulls up the results I want for searches, it has relevant information relating to the search in the left column (the "company information" links are neat--not enough companies have them but if bing catches on this will be extremely useful), and the home page, while not quite as simple as google, is simple enough.
Is it better than google? Way to early to say, but it's definately a worthy Yahoo competitor. I'll be using it for a while to see how it goes.
EDIT: Alright I've found a pretty big complaint.
Specifically, I looked up "2009 Atlantic Hurricane Season" and did not find an entry for wikipedia's page with the same exact name. When I looked up "2009 Atlantic Hurricane Season wiki", it did not pull up any search results. When I did this with google it was the first entry, and google still had 493,000 results.
On the positive side, recent events such as "Tiller", "Flight 447", and "GM Bankruptcy" pull up plenty of relevant results, an area where many new search engines have trouble usually. Still, specifics are worse than google--for example, "Flight 447 foxnews" does not show Foxnews.com's article regarding flight 447 (google does). This type of searching is crucial if bing hopes to compete with google.
Score: 1
|Just can't work it in. "Just" search nowadays is a little too retro for my workflow. With Google I can have my search, sites, feeds, and gadgets all on one page. Bing is still one-dimensional unless I have totally missed the "add stuff".
The blinky images (hover suqares?) are also quite distracting to me.
I can see how this would work for folks who currently use a "search page" without the frills, but it just isn't going to work for me...
Now...if only I could get my google home-page to search using "bing"...I could test results. :p
Score: 0
|I did a search for 2009 Atlantic Hurricane Season and I got the wiki as the first result....I'm not sure why u didn't get that as a result
Score: 1
|Every search engine handles how the query is entered differently. Order of the words, words used, that kind of thing.
Part of finding a search engine that suits each person is finding the one that responds the best to the way you query them.
For example, I can search for virtually anything on Google and get the responses I desire in one or two attempts. Any other search engine drives me nuts because they never work "right"...(In other words, they don't work in the way I have become used to in my years using Google). The crazy bas**** in the next office is a die-hard yahoo'er. The very same affliction has taken hold of him substituting Yahoo for Google. Neither of us can use Bing or Ask or anything else and get decent results.
Who knows? Bing could be the next great engine... it just doesn't work the way *I* have become accustomed to.
Score: 1
|I like bing and google both, and especially comparing them, so I made a quick little mashup that ya'll are free to try out and use.. enjoy!
http://bingle.pwnij.com/
Score: 2
|Nice!
Google wins on the "wtf" search. ;) (Safe search disabled)
Note: Currently, clicking a link on one of the search panes opens that page in the pane you launched it from. Perhaps it might be better if it simply opened that page (getting rid of the panes)?
Score: 0
|yah, I'd like to make it do that, but I'm not sure how to change the links returned by google and bing. I'm looking into it.
Thanks for the suggestion.. keep 'em comin!
Score: 1
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