So I had a problem with Bing claiming to help you make decisions (see Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine.) But a recent post by Benj Arriola from BusinessOnLine really put the nail in the coffin.
Through a tip from an SEO friend, Benj demonstrated in a simple search test that Bing search results are way biased, or inadequate for a major search engine, or both. The test consisted of searching for the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” in each of the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine. A very reasonable task, I should add.
Guess what the results were? In a nutshell:
- Google search engine: Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results. No surprise because that’s what you’d expect for well-known sites.
- Yahoo search engine: Same expected results. Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results.
- Bing search engine. The search on “Google” gives a single result on google.com. The search on “Yahoo” gives a single result on yahoo.com. But the search on “Microsoft” yields plenty of results on both the company and its various products and services!
You can test all of this by conducting the searches yourselves. It’s totally duplicable, at least for now. Below are my own tests.
Google search engine results.
Yahoo search engine results.
Bing search engine results.
These are real funny results. Heck, the term “yak” (or substitute your own term) returns more results than “Google” and “Yahoo” combined, according to Bing.
Oh and another thing. If you look at Bing’s search results for “Google” and “Yahoo” you’ll see to the right of the single result in each case is a list of similar search engines. And Bing is at the top of this list. But when you search for “Bing” on Bing, there is no list for alternative search engines to be seen anywhere. It’s like google and Yahoo don’t exist. Pretty odd.
The bottom line: I don’t think users of Bing is getting unbiased search results. You can make your own conclusion.
Read Benj’s post “Should I Trust Bing’s Search Engine Results?“
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Tags: Bing, Google, search engine result, search engines, search result page, search results, Yahoo
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