Search Wars Rage On: Bing vs. Google

While Bing is rel­a­tively new in this indus­try, there are a lot of fea­tures to the search engine that observers have already been prais­ing. Microsoft, for its part, con­tin­ues to make improve­ments on its search engine, the lat­est being Visual Search.

Fea­tures

Visual Search allows Inter­net users to search the web via imagery where you can quickly scroll through gal­leries. On the left side of the win­dow are tabs that will help you refine your search even fur­ther. Visual Search also allows you to read details about a par­tic­u­lar image with­out hav­ing to go to the web­site, so you can decide whether or not you actu­ally want to visit the site. When you hover over a thumb­nail, you will see a list of infor­ma­tion — for instance, if you are search­ing for movies, you will see a title, reviews, rat­ings and so on.

Ini­tially, there will be 50 cat­e­gories offered on Visual Search and you can browse through a vari­ety of prod­ucts, books, peo­ple, cars and many more.

Bing vs. Google

Microsoft hasn’t really said that Bing is being molded as a Google com­peti­tor but nat­u­rally, com­par­isons between the two will be made and while there are still some kinks that need to be worked out on the Microsoft search engine, it’s actu­ally not doing all too bad.

Its per­for­mance for nat­ural lan­guage search, for one, is report­edly one advan­tage that it has over Google. In nat­ural lan­guage search, you can type in com­plete ques­tions instead of just key­words and for a lot of peo­ple this def­i­nitely means a more refined search and less time scour­ing through the tons of infor­ma­tion that is pre­sented to you.

A test was recently con­ducted on Google and Bing by an inde­pen­dent group and as expected, Google got high marks with Microsoft’s search engine still suf­fer­ing con­sid­er­ably from bugs. In spite of these results, though, testers con­tend that there were a lot of areas that Bing was doing right. Its user inter­face, for one, has been admired and the addi­tion of Visual Search should enhance user expe­ri­ence even more.

Google’s End

For its part, Google as it is its fash­ion, has been con­sis­tently rolling out some improve­ments of its own, most notably Google Caf­feine, which is said to be the next gen­er­a­tion Google search. The search engine giant is due to make a major upgrade that will greatly enhance search­ing in terms of accu­racy, com­pre­hen­sive­ness, speed and other areas. Users may not notice the dif­fer­ence as most of the improve­ments are in its archi­tec­ture and it still sports the same user inter­face. How­ever, Google assures us the search engine will be more robust as a result of this upgrade.

Another new exper­i­ment from Google is Google Fast Flip which is designed to enhance read­ing expe­ri­ence — that is, news and mag­a­zine read­ing. The project aims to pro­vide users with a more con­ve­nient and fun way to read by sim­u­lat­ing the expe­ri­ence one goes through when flip­ping through a tra­di­tional news­pa­per or mag­a­zine. Google has part­nered with some of the pub­lish­ing industry’s top play­ers, among them, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Wash­ing­ton Post, Salon and ProPublica.

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Tags: bing, Google, search, search engine, wars

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 12:44 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.