Bing vs. Google

It’s been quite a while since my latest post, and I encountered myself many times thinking I should blog about this and then for some reason I didn’t do it. So now I decided to stop for a minute (actually I’m waiting for the build) and write about this search engine ‘war’ we’re in the middle of.

At the red corner we have Google which does not need any further presentation, and on the blue corner we have Bing. Some time ago Microsoft came out with bing I decided to give it a try, but really give it a try setting it as my default search engine in my browsers. I decided to try it cause I found the design of the site pretty cool. There are tons of feature that I don’t get to use cause I’m not in the US, so I can’t search for the closest pizza place to where I am right now… but there a few other features that got my attention, for instance, no need to go thru pages when searching for images, just scroll down. Also, when searching for videos, you get a tiny screenshot of the video which you can play from the bing site itself.

All that it’s pretty neat, but, does it find what I’m looking for? mm mmm… well, not in the order I expected them. For instance, I use the search engines a lot to find solutions to error messages I get while programming. I also use them to find the members of a class I need to use… so, if I search for a class, I expect the msdn site to be at top and in bing that does not always happen, while it does with Google.

I guess Google’s page rank it is still a little better… and while bing is still a beta, I expect those results to come out right…

One point to microsoft though, I’m searching for stuff that belong to them and their own sites don’t show up on top, which means their algorithm is not as good as it should yet but they are not doing anything (they could) to show their sites on top…