#169 - Search Carefully

There are now a few more search sites and engines out there. Bing is by Microsoft and you know about Yahoo search and Google search. If you upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer or get a new PC, you will automatically use the Microsoft Bing search engine. So what you say? Aren't all search engines about the same? Actually not. There are patents and secrets and schemes that each search engine uses to get to the answers you expect.

Google recently announced that 25% of the search requests it gets are unique. That is, no one has ever asked for to search for the exact same thing. So how a search engine goes about its search and how it filters results is important. People don't generally go past the first page in results. So having the relative important information on the first page is key to a search engines effectiveness. For example I did a search for "Cost of Milk" and Google and Bing had the same first entry: a USDA report on milk costs. Google had a Wikipedia entry next and Bing had a magazine article. From here the entries were completely different.

The Atlantic recently did an informal study of Google and Bing search engines and found Bing to not filter results as well as Google. False sites (ones that have malware and other baddies) come up much more frequently on Bing searches then Google.

There is a great site out there that will let you compare the two sites side by side on a given search: http://www.bing-vs-google.com/

PCSS still recommends Google as its search engine of choice. If you have Bing and would like to change there usually is a little down arrow next to the search box that can let you change to another search engine provider!