Is Microsoft’s Bing really a better search engine? Since it debuted last month, it has earned praise for the smart way it presents results and how it lets users preview Web sites without clicking through to them.
Yet a closer look at its results reveals why loyal Yahoo users may not end up happy with the deal the company announced Wednesday, which calls for Bing to replace Yahoo Search.
ComScore Inc. says 19.6 percent of Web users go to Yahoo for their searches. Microsoft draws fewer, at 8.4 percent. That’s up just slightly from the 8 percent it captured before Bing launched at the start of June. It didn’t make a dent in Google’s commanding 65 percent market share.
I think I can see why. Not only is using Google such an ingrained habit that we talk of “googling” something, but also its technology is better in some key ways. I found Bing to be less comprehensive than Google and, surprisingly, Yahoo Search. It simply returns fewer results for a lot of search terms.
With common terms like “cars,” all the search engines return oodles of results. Yahoo reports 2.56 billion pages with that term. It doesn’t matter so much how many pages they report, as long as they give relevant results, and all do.
Then I tried to hunt for something purposely obscure, like background on the country manor that my sister is interested in buying. Google gave me 46 links, Yahoo 15. Bing supplied just six.
Of course, even in this kind of query you might not have time to look through every link. So if Bing has six and they’re good, that’s fine.
Yet in the country manor search and other cases, often at the fringes of what you’d expect the Internet to know, I found the most relevant results in Google and Yahoo…