About a week ago, I mentioned that I would be trying out Microsoft’s Bing as my default search engine in my main browser (Firefox 4.0) on my main computer, for at least seven days. So, the week has passed… what are my impressions of Bing, when I had used Google for years?
After my last couple of posts looking at the comparative hits between Google and Bing and investigating the reasons for the huge discrepancy (Bing bringing me a puny 2-3% of Google’s hits), I’m still curious about this subject. So far, it appears that Bing brings me 2-3% of what Google brings because it has 2-3% of the users Google has… which seems too low a number to me. Yes, “google” as a verb has entered everyday language (“I’ve just googled for it”), and it’s the default browser on most non-Microsoft browsers (though I’ve heard that a couple of them changed their defaults to Bing recently), but, well, Internet Explorer is still widely used (unfortunately), and it certainly defaults to Bing.
Further investigation may be in order, but, unless both companies reveal their search volume, there’s no way to know with certainty. We can look at other statistics such as Alexa, which are certainly far from definitive, and which lists google.com as #1 worldwide (and remember that there are many other “international” Googles), and Bing as #20 worldwide (#14 in the US). Google (again, just the “.com” version) is listed as having a “reach” of 49.05000, while Bing supposedly has a “reach” of 4.77600. This puts Bing as 9% of Google, but if you add in the international Googles, the 2-3% actually sound like a plausible result.
Still, all of this, and we haven’t actually asked an important question: how good actually is Bing, for users? Are people — even Internet Explorer users — using Google out of habit / popularity, or is Bing in fact a worse search engine — say, providing worse, less relevant search results, giving you exactly what you want at the #1 position less often, or not even finding something that exists when Google does? Only one way to find out: my 7-day-long Bing trial. (Actually, 8-day-long, since I started it yesterday, but I think that ending on a Saturday is nicer than on a Friday).
Until April 2, I’m going to be using Bing as the default search engine on my main browser (Firefox 4), and I’ll post my impressions after that time. If you’re interested in SEO, or simply curious, I’d suggest you try the same — learning is always good, isn’t it? 🙂 To do it in Firefox:
about:config, accept the so-called “risk” if it’s your first time doing so, search for keyword.URL, and change it to “https://www.bing.com/results.aspx?q=“, without the quotes. Yes, it ends with an equal sign. To switch back to Google, change it tohttps://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=“. I believe this is unchanged if you’re using Firefox 3.x instead of 4 (though you really ought to upgrade, Firefox 4 is great).