Way back when, when stagecoaches ruled the highways, and the internet was not owned by Google, Yahoo ran the world of search engines. Alta Vista gave it a good whirl as a competitor, but then the mighty Google came by smacking all of them to an extremely downgraded second place at best. Where was Microsoft in all of this?

July 22nd: I recently created a poll about this, and would love your vote on what search engine you think is better: Which Gives Better Search Results, Google or Bing?

Microsoft Was Waiting For A Business Model

Yahoo has its platform, and I personally still use it today, MyYahoo.com. Microsoft followed that path as well. When both were building on the only known business model known for search, user pages/portal. Google was busy producing better results, and a method to monetize from it. Microsoft wasn’t really waiting, they just didn’t think of it first.

Everyone says Google is great (I still use it), but as far as I am concerned, Microsoft is still kicking its butt. Here is a post I did in Feb. 2008, The Best Search Engine. With the rebirth of Live, now basically Bing, I decided to do a little more research. In that research I found a second reason.  Microsoft spent thirty million researching how people search.

Live and Bling do not put all their marbles into the indexing algorithms. They dump a lot of it in building  more intuitive results, finding that as much as 30% of all searchers give up. Their method to beat Google? Don’t just  give great results, give great results right away, intuitively. This is your warning if you think Google will be king for a long time. Bing will be aggressively competing with Google, and don’t be surprised if you start seeing televised ads for it. The people at Microsoft think they have something on Google, and they are starting the attack.

My Numbers Still Say Microsoft Is Better

It could be just the visitors that come to this site are different, but if you checked the post I referenced earlier, the numbers were based on several popular sites I have. Doing a quick look at this site again based on the past month here is why I say Bing is better…forgetting the ten times the volume of traffic generated by Google.

Simply looking at this last month, Bing visitors average 0.8 pages more per visit. They average forty seconds longer per session, and they have  5% lesser bounce. All of those are pretty significant numbers, and if most of my traffic had come from Microsoft, Google would most certainly be second in my book. My original post again? The Best Search Engine.

Are you using Bing to get your search results? Who do you think gives the best results?

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