Bing.com: But It’s Not Google-Part I

I used a typical title for this post which is creating a buzz in the twitter spehere.

Bing: But It’s Not Google. Should Bing try to be Google is a bigger question that Microsoft should ask. I like there approach of calling it decision engine. I am not sure how well it justifies the title though!

Bing’s first impression looks decent compared to it’s other Micrsoft predecessors. You know what I hate most. I hate stealing the concepts and ideas. I am not sure who stole from whom, but the look and feel of Bing looks very similar to the new show options… feature in Google. I am sure there has been some business intelligence that’s working here.

Anyways what I wanted to do was to compare side by side the 2 services viz a viz Bing and Google and see what makes them better over each other.

Because I wanted to be fair I used IE 8 to compare the 2 services. We know that MS will need a kick on the head (if not butt…) to not be a stickler to IE. And Google really doesn’t have too much of choice and has to work and test it’s services on IE till it’s dead and dumped. But I guess there’s no escape for Google from IE. Not any time soon.

I also tried to ensure that both the services are evaluated for their global TLDs and that’s .com. I wanted to avoid the bias by choosing India specific data centers. I guess I am going to stop being a stickler my self to the intricate details. So let’s get started..

Favicons

I hate the favicons of both the services. The favicons are so not web 2.0. Is it too much to ask. Really, please Micrsoft (MS) and Google hire some good graphic designers and get the looks going for favicon. We know that MS uses Apple for all it’s graphics and image manipulations and enhancements. We also know that Google doesn’t keep the designers happy and their performance is measured similar to those of Engineers (So called). But a little effort on the design part will help us like you more.

The favicon of Bing is a suggesting a sense of purpose. It has a bull’s eye kind of look; meaning, your search ends here or we are on the spot with your search needs.

Home Page

I am not sure if I’ll ever home page of a search engine to perform a search as I am more of a geek (or at least self proclaimed geek) using the FF (Firefox) search box for all my search needs, but I still thought to compare the 2 home pages.

Bing.com: Disgusting home page with background image. We are talking web 2.0 and minimalistic design Microsoft! Why is it so difficult? Also what’s with the copyright stuff at the bottom right hand.

Google.com: It’s lovely simple design is one of the biggest success factor. Microsoft please understand that Google cannot be more obvious about this simple fact!

The search results area

Bing.com has “displayed” allowed search result area of 640 pixels compared to Google’s which is 880 pixels. The smaller area for Bing can be attributed to the fact that Bing has a related searches column on the left hand site. Both are almost approx figures.

Connotation/Repercussion

Bing might already be looking at adding more features as it’s using less space to display the search results and using some space to show related searches (which is almost an advance feature) or it might at some point put sponsored results in the related searches area. Knowing MS and its loathsomeness towards Google coupled with its constant desire of beating (or getting some share of the pie) Google at search, I am sure it’s not looking at making easy money at the expense of good discriminating features.

The biggest repercussion of Bing having such a design diplay strategy for it’s SERPs is the fact that it’s ignoring the eye tracking heat map research on SERPs. Maybe it’s trying to create it’s own

Advanced Search

Google is a clear winner here with more number of options in advance search. I also like Google’s placement of link for advance search. It’s just next to the search box. Bing.com is not very visible as it’s away from the main box.

Number of Results for a query

I searched for a phrase “hotels in gurgaon” (without quotes) and found that Bing.com threw 918,000 results compared to Google’s 2,350,000 which is 39% of Google. In other words the number of result pages for the above query on Bing is 2/5th of that of Google.

I wont go into the details of how SEO will get affected on Bing.com compared to Google. However, one feature I really liked about bing is the synopsis of search results. Following is what I mean:

I am not even going to look into the ads/sponsored results as they are mostly dependent on the the ad inventory a search engine has for a particular query and Google beats any other service flawlessly.

I am also struggling to comprehend the URL parameters for Bing search. I am still looking to see if Bing has query modifiers.

Spam Index

The amount of spam is what’s going to be a key factor and both of them are not untouched with spammers trying to get up there. I searched for intitle:cheap viagra site:.edu and found lots of bad stuff. Still amazed. What is Google doing with spam on educational sites.

Bing.com indexing dynamic URLS

Almost a lost cause when it comes to creating an index is trying to index dynamic URL and I performed site:google.com to find enough number of feedburner URLs being indexed by Bing. I am also amazed what Google is doing to disallow indexing of such URLs my clausifying robots.txt.

More to come…

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