Let’s be blunt about this.  No reality competition cliff hangers. No right after this commercial break.  Let’s just dive right in for those that have no interest in staying ‘til the end. 

Basically, from my perspective…Google’s still king!

As I stated in my previous post to set up my intentions for this comparison, I made Bing my default search provider in Chrome for what I consider a “significant” length of time.  That turned out to be a couple of months.  If Bing gave me search results that were useful relative to my needs, then it got a tick mark.  If it didn’t, I jumped over to Google to see what its take on the same search would be.  If Google came up with something useful, it got the tick mark.

It should be noted that I realize this isn’t a very scientific process.  Trust me, I’ve had it pointed out to me several times by those that noticed the accumulation of tick marks on my whiteboard.  I get it, it’s a bit hack.  But at the same time, determining which search engine provides better results is a completely subjective process that could never truly be scientifically analyzed anyways.  So, I deem my process good enough for my needs and good enough to blog about.

As you might have guessed from me giving away the punch-line at the start of this post, Bing was a bit of a disappointment.  It turns out that about 30% of the time Bing gave me an answer that I didn’t find useful and Google was able to provide something better.  That’s a fairly significant amount of the time, certainly not good enough to be named my default going forward…or to even give it a chance at a one to one comparison with Google.  It just didn’t cut it.

Beyond the 30% fail rate though, what really started to bother me about Bing was its rigidity and inability to cope with my mistakes.  Mistakes like me making a typo.  Where Google seamlessly adapts to such a mistype by its users, Bing responds with something like so:

Not being able to adapt and push forward through such a typo is just not acceptable anymore.  Google handled it perfectly without any further effort out of me.  It recognized that there was a 99% chance that I was talking about checkstyle, a software development tool for adding code convention checking to your build process, and gave me the results for its assumption.  While on the other hand, Bing just stood there with a dumb look on its face like it had no freaking idea what the hell I was talking about.

So Google’s officially back as my default browser.  Though this comparison was enough to convince me  of its superiority, you shouldn’t let it convince you.  As I said, I had this test on my whiteboard for two months.  Anyone that saw it had an opinion on this and some of those opinions were that Bing definitely supplied more natural, useful results than Google.  You basically just need to figure out what works best for you and go with it.  Bing has a lot of functionality and is far superior than all past challengers of Google’s space.  But for me, it still falls short.