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A few weeks ago, I noticed a blog post from the Cuil blog (Cuil is that new search engine) named So how is Bing doing? I found it very interesting that Cuil did a blog post on how good Bing is. In any event, I decided not to cover it, probably due to a lack of time.
Now that Tedster mentioned it in a WebmasterWorld thread and pulled out four main points from the blog post, I figured I brief on this. The four main points are:
- Bing had 2.9% spam, Google had 2.56% spam, while Yahoo had 4.9%
- Bing prefers URL matches more
- Bing seems to prefer pages where the term occurs with its first letter capitalized
- Bing does less term-rewriting than Google.
What I found interesting was Tedster's comments on the last point. Tedster said:
If Google is going to lose ground to Bing/Yahoo it will be in this area -- too much giving you what they THINK you mean instead of what you actually typed.
Now, I won't argue with that statement, but it is interesting in that this was most people's number on complaint about Microsoft's products. Everyone joked and still jokes that Bill Gates or Windows knows better with auto complete features. And yes, I see more and more complaints that Google is changing the searchers search query, even though the searcher does not want to search for what Google thinks they should search for.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Michael Martinez
08/17/2009 07:17 pm
It's an interesting post but since the raters weren't allowed to actually look at the sites their measurements are nonsense. In fact, since there is no industry-wide definition of "spam", asking people to rate sites as spammy without even allowing them to look at it is equivalent to asking people to guess how many cities are in Russia without allowing them to look at a map.