Google is undeniably the name that everyone associates with online search. It is so deeply embedded in the current mind share that it is now a verb. But is it really the superior search engine? How does Bing compare? This week, “Prospect Genius Reviews…” will try to get to the bottom of these questions.
When you first start using Bing to search online, you’ll notice right away that there’s… nothing to notice. In truth, there’s really not much of a discernible difference between Google and Bing. Google may load results and index pages faster than Bing, but the actual relevance and accuracy of the results are just about equal.
In his article “I Ditched Google for a Week,” Farhad Manjoo says, “Going from Google to Bing [is] not even as big a shift as ditching Coke for Pepsi. Instead, it’s on the order of switching from Tide to the supermarket brand. There are some differences between the two, but only obsessives will notice that anything is off.”
From our own firsthand experience, we couldn’t agree more. In fact, the president and CEO of Prospect Genius switched all of his mobile and desktop default settings to Bing close to two years ago”and he hasn’t felt any urge to switch back. We believe that’s a testimony in and of itself!
Also, Prospect Genius reviews Bing positively because Bing’s data mining isn’t as invasive or aggressive as Google’s. Google is notorious for remembering every search query, every line in an e-mail, every website. On the surface, Google does this because it wants to make its search algorithm as accurate as possible. But really, when it comes down to it, it’s about information. Information is its own form of currency, and Google wants to have it all.
However, that doesn’t mean Bing’s hands are totally clean, either. Bing pulls a lot of data from Facebook and other social media as a way of predicting what you’re looking for when compiling search results. It uses the interests and activities of you and your friends in order to guess which results will be more relevant to you. And while Microsoft may not be as pernicious as Google in terms of data collection, Facebook is pretty close.
Some other notes: Google does tend to pull more in-depth pages than Bing, and its autocorrect is more accurate. On the other hand, Bing is better at locating pages on specified domains. Bing users also love its image and video search capabilities (you can filter photos by license type and you can hover over video thumbnails to watch previews). Meanwhile, Bing and Google are both equally adept at avoiding spam and excessive bias within their search results.
Overall, you probably won’t go wrong with either Google or Bing. Each search engine comes with its own set of nuances, but you’ll get roughly the same results with both. If data privacy is a concern, then you’re better off switching between them regularly so neither corporation has too much information on you. So, the next time you use “google” as a verb, don’t forget that Bing also offers you effective options for online search, too!
Next time on “Prospect Genius Reviews…,” we’ll cover Google Shopping.