Blimey It's Not Good

Shocked that the competition appears to be no competition

[FranticFish]

Mods please move or delete as you see fit, this is a bit of a sound off.

Doing some research across different verticals and also different geographical areas within a major UK conurbation, basic stuff, just looking for business listing opportunities and chambers of commerce etc - the 'low hanging fruit' that can help with local. Updating my database, data mining via various searches and clicking through to page 10 or thereabouts of the results

Shocked by how much worse Bing is than Google for this. I have whinged about Google's results, but here's what I found:

1) Google knew what towns belonged to what counties, and what local hamlets were part of what districts
Its ability to pull in results that related to the area I was researching FAR outpaced Bing

2) The lack of host crowding in Bing is WAY WORSE than it is in Google
Some pages in Bing had up to 4 results from 1 domain, and the same domains kept cropping up from page to page to page

3) Google has more diversity of results - WAY more

This exercise has yielded about 100 domains to investigate.
Perhaps 5 of these came from Bing as results that Google didn't know about.
But Bing did not know about at least 75-80 of the domains that Google did.

I find this rather depressing. It appears to me (based not just on this but also on my investigation of PPC advertising with Bing) that Bing are not trying to innovate for themselves or provide an alternative. Rather, they are trying to copy the concepts that Google have laid down, but are not doing it as well. For example, Google Ads still allow Manual CPC. Bing does not! WTF? Oh sure I'll definitely go to the trouble of signing up to your 4% market share ad offering with WORSE targeting than your competition offers. Jesus.

Whatever it is that replaces Google, it will NOT be Bing in my opinion. In fact they are SO little competition that you could be forgiven for thinking they'd been paid to take a dive.

[martinibuster]

It can be a mix of good and bad SERPs over on Bing.

Some of the SERPs on Google that are bad seem better over on Bing.

But I can't say I've been wowed by Bing to the extent that I'm abandoning Google.

[iamlost]

Yes, Bing is not the Google killer you are looking for.

I use Bing as my default, on principle, then shift through DDG (w/o, w) !g, and when required via Google directly. None are perfect, all have crap stinking up the results, ranking misses and redundancies, etc.

Most commonly when searching a subject I start with a query but then follow site intra/inter site links just like thirty years ago.

To be effective a ‘new’ SE would have to be exclusionary by default, there being so much garbage (thanks AdSense :)) that any general SE will suffer from GIGO. And curation, by definition, has biases...

From a webdev revenue traffic POV, however, Bing is delightful with Google the poor performer staying relevant by virtue of commodity volume rather than intrinsic value.

Pita all round to be honest.

[FranticFish]

The desperate lack of host crowding on Bing might not be so noticeable on searches where there are more results to find. This exercise was more like panning for gold and than deciding which tree in the orchard to pick fruit from.

There were a lot of internal pages from bigger domains beating smaller domains that were dedicated to the search topic going on in both sets of results. But moreso in Bing.

Above all, it was Google's knowledge of the relationships between different geographic entities that really stood out. In big cities in the UK there is overlap between town names, place names, area names, boroughs, wards, counties, administrative areas and so on. Perhaps Bing's very small UK market share let it down here, as this sort of search is not going to be a priority for them.

[RhinoFish]

And on Mobile, it's even worse for Bing.
Not just the results, but they missed the mobile revolution.
Compare your Google versus Bing search traffic looking at the mobile results, ouch.

[Mark_A]

We get a lot more in depth searches on Google than we do on Bing.

I want Bing to provide an alternative to Google, but at the moment they don't seem to capture the mass of detailed searches that Google does,

[FranticFish]

When I got on the web it was Yahoo and Looksmart (i.e. Microsoft) who seemed to be the major players.

I was massively impressed with Google when I encountered them, and recommended them to all my friends. In today's language they were a disruptor brand doing it better and were more nice and fluffy to boot. Times change, but there is still no-one that I can see that does it better than Google overall.

What I find so staggering is that, having had a position of dominance and then having lost it, Microsoft don't seem to understand WHY. I don't think you get to replace an increasingly unpopular top dog by being a watered-down, less effective version of them. You do it by being DIFFERENT.

[engine]

You can find much of what's needed on Bing, but it's pretty much been locked out through Android and Google. Add to that the negligible marketing, and Google's great work on Chrome it means it will remain a distant second.

I use it all the time, but that's not what most people do.

[tangor]

I do Bing for results useful. I google to see what games the biggest ecosystem of ads and manipulation. :)

Both work!