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Google has been synonymous with search for everyone, and poor Bing—quickly became synonymous with sarcasm about why anyone would ever use Bing.
We’ve talked about Bing’s biggest strengths before, but people often ignore that Bing also does a lot of things just about as well as Google. SO WHICH ONE IS BETTER?.
The Contenders
Google: The number 1 search engine in the world, Google Search has been around since 1997 and is constantly improving with new smart results, advanced features, and integration with other Google products. As of February of this year, Google currently has 64.5% of the US’s search market share.
Bing: previously called Windows Live Search and MSN Search. Bing brands itself as a “decision engine”, aiming to present results with more real-world context than just text on a page. Bing also powers Yahoo’s search, which, coupled with Bing, serves 32.6% of US internet searchers. Approx. 1 out of 3 searches are happening on Bing search engine!
Bing’s Layout and Search Features
Bing’s video search is significantly better than Google’s. Instead of giving you a vertical list of videos with small thumbnails, it gives you a grid of large thumbnails that you can click on to play without leaving Bing. For some videos, it’ll even give you a preview if you hover over.
Bing gives more autocomplete suggestions than Google does in most cases. Google only gives 4, while Bing gives 8. This is particularly useful if you’re planning to use autocomplete to find alternative products or to get wildcard suggestions.
And Bing is ready to give away free stuff for people who use its search engine. By doing searches and using Bing features, you rack up credits that can be used to buy things like gift cards or movie tickets. Who doesn’t like FREE Stuff 🙂
Bing Image Search
Bing’s Image Search has one or two more advanced options like “Layout” (which lets you search for portrait or landscape images). Bing’s image search also lets you remove certain parts of your search term with one click, which is kind of cool (I wish it did this for all searches).
Bing puts related searches and related image searches to the right of your search results, while google puts them near the bottom. This isn’t really a good or a bad thing; it’s just a difference.
Bing has also adopted many of Google’s “smart searches”, like movie showtimes, unit conversions, local weather, information about famous people, and stuff like that.
Bing Ticket Price Fluctuation
If you’re searching for flights, Bing has a neat feature that predicts whether ticket prices will go up or down.
Here’s a list of Bing’s advanced operator but there’s a lot of overlap. Google has more, though, and is going to be better for advanced searches except for 2 searches that only Bing can do:
contains:, which allows you to search for pages that contain a certain filetype (for example, PDF). On Google, this will only link you to the PDF files themselves, but on Bing, it’ll give you pages that contain links to PDF files, which can be useful.
linkfromdomain:, which shows you the best-ranked pages linked to from a certain site (for example, the best sites Lifehacker has linked to on a certain subject).
feed:, which lets you search for RSS feeds on a particular subject.
What are your thoughts on using Bing vs Google? Contact our team at 210-582-5842 if you need help with your Bing Marketing Strategy.
