Since Google’s creation in 1997, they have been on the forefront of search. Google continues to push the envelope on what they can do, and they are constantly improving how they get results to their users. They are by far the most used search engine in the United States and currently possess an 81.5% market share for searches in the United States.
On the opposite side, Bing is the direct competitor to Google Search. Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, previously referred to as Windows Live and MSN Search. Bing positions it’s brand as the “decision search engine”, with hopes of providing “real-world” context rather than just text that seems to match a search query. Additionally, Bing powers Yahoo’s search engine which, between the two different search engines, yields a United States market share of 9.33%.
Google and Bing Search Features
When comparing the interface and layout of the two search giants, they appear to be almost identical in how they display their results. If you left out either of their logos it would be very hard to discern a difference.
The main difference between Google and Bing’s search features is that Bing provides a much better video search results page. Bing’s video page provides a grid view of large thumbnails instead of Google’s vertical list of small thumbnails. Bing also provides a preview of certain videos and clicking them will not take you away from the Bing site.
Google does a better job than Bing when it comes to their shopping feature. The Google Shopping feature appears on the search results page more often than the Bing Shopping feature. Additionally, Google Shopping will provide which stores carry a certain product, as well as where to find the best prices online.
When comparing image searches between the two, Bing and Google are both incredibly similar. Google’s Image Search appears to be more polished when compared to Bing’s. However, they have a few more advanced search options such as “layout” which helps you narrow down the sizing of your image search. Also, Bing’s Image Search lets you remove specific parts of your search query with just a click.
Although these two different search engines provide essentially the exact same things, Bing does some things better than Google and vice versa. It really depends on what you’re searching for when deciding which is superior. Bing is better for video results but if you’re going shopping, Google will likely be the best option.
Technical Difficulties
We just analyzed how Google as well as Bing, operate from the searcher’s point of view. Now let’s discuss what it’s like from a website owner’s point of view. Google or Bing are both great tools that allow websites and businesses the opportunity to appear in their search engine results page.
What makes Google the ideal search engine for your website is that they favor newer, fresher content rather than older content. Google prefers to rank blogs and service pages from your website so that their results page can be as accurate as possible. The more you post on your site, and how new and accurate the information is, will help your website appear on the results page for Google.
On the other hand, Bing favors older, more established web pages as opposed to newer and fresher ones. Bing ranks websites based on their web presence and ranks homepages rather than blogs and service pages. Where Google will show search specific results, Bing will provide results closely related to your query, as well as suggest related search terms on their results page.
If you’re a website owner, these are two major differences to consider when trying to rank on one of these search engines. The best one to try and rank on is definitely going to be Google. This is based on the fact that Google examines websites further than Bing does, and provides search-specific results rather than relating results. In short, Google is more search-specific with their results, while Bing is more topic-specific. Additionally, Google has a much higher market share than Bing and receives a much higher volume of searches than them.
Conclusion
Both of these search engines have their pros and cons. Bing provides a better video search feature than Google, and Google provides a better shopping feature than Bing. At the end of the day, Google is going to show more search-specific results where Bing is going to show more topic-related search results. Either way, both of these search engines are going to provide a plethora of information you can’t find anywhere else. Google has just been around longer and continues to further develop their site and adapt to the ever-changing internet.
– Written By Jonah Ericksen