I compare the search results of Google vs. Bing on three terms that I find poorly represented on Google: Hotels, Sheet Music and Feng Shui.

A new article from Techcrunch this morning highlighted a basic but effective mashup of Bing vs. Google. If you read the Techcrunch article you will get a good overview of the comparisons. Naturally, I searched for myself. On Google I own the whole front page with relevant links (the blog, econsultancy profile, brand republic profile etc.) – on Bing there are very similar results, with the addition of jamieriddell.net which I hadn’t registered (I rectified that) so not much to learn from there.

I then looked at three areas in which I don’t get good results, namely hotels, sheet music and Feng Shui.

So lets look for a Hotel in Edinburgh.

To be fair, these results are neck and neck. Both results have sponsored ads, map links (more from Google) and then a list of hotel specific websites, leaving little room for aggregators on either platform.

Sheet Music. I am just starting to learn the piano so I want to find some sheet music. Like Pink Floyd Sheet Music.

For this, Google offers many links to different sites whereas Bing offers fewer links focusing on a handful of websites. The first three natural Google ranks were spammy, offering me further links with little content.  The first link on Bing is totally spammy, but follows with three quality sites offering exactly what I want. I would pick Bing as the winner here for quality of content delivered.

Feng Shui. I have been given a money tree and want to know where I should place that in my room. I tried these searches yesterday. So I searched for, “where do I place a money tree in my room?”

The Google results were just spam filled. Not even one answer to this direct question, including results for real estate less than half way down the page. Bing wins marginally for having slightly better content linked but there wasn’t much in it. For reference I aske dhtat question on Mahalo, Yahoo Answers and Twitter and couldn’t get the answer. I resorted to buying a book!

So, not entirely conclusive at this early stage but Bing has the potential to make me switch if it weren’t for the Google hooks of Gmail, Analytics etc.

How have you found it?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Still Searching for More Search Users (markevanstech.com)
• What Do You Think of Bing? (blogs.wsj.com)
• IMshopping Provides Human-Powered Shopping Suggestions [Recommendations] (lifehacker.com)
• Future of search may not be about indexes and algorithms (financegeek.com)
• Wow: Bing Has Live Video Thumbnails — But is it Fair Use? (beet.tv)

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals – Microsoft announced today its Bing search engine, a "decision engine" that will replace live.com worldwide as of June 3. A distant third place in the search engine game, Microsoft hopes that this engine will help it gain more searcher share by delivering results and content more relevant to how users actually search. What makes Bing different from existing search engines?
• Micropayments for content and services | Contenture – Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor's monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
• Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web – Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play
• Linkbait Writing Services | Unique linkbait writing services to help your website grow and get more traffic. – At Linkbait Writing Services, we are determined to bring your website or blog more traffic by creating quality linkbait articles. Our small team of writers strive to create linkbait articles that will not only help you reach the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon, but also bring you traffic for the lifetime of your blog. Save your time for marketing your blog and interaction with your readers and let us take care of the time consuming task of building linkbait articles.
• WordPress Designers – Premium WordPress Themes – WordPress Designers is a small team of talented developers and creative designers. We pride ourselves on our intimate knowledge or WordPress and our ability to push it to its limits. Since discovering the WordPress platform several years ago, we have strived to learn as much as we could about it so that we could bring you some of the most creative and well coded themes on the market.
• Outlaw Design Blog » 34 Brilliant Ads on Semi Trucks – a great post showing loads of advertising designs on lorries
• ConceptShare: – ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• 5 Basic Rules for Creating an Effective About Page — Des Walsh dot Com – This short list of basic rules for creating an effective About page has been prompted by my frustration with the number of blogs and other websites that either do not have an About page or, more commonly in my experience, do not put their About page to work effectively in the interests of their business.
• Small Screen Blog: All about mobile – (by MoFuse) – If you believe that mobile is a strong medium to reach your customers – you need to be thinking about how your brand will evolve on the mobile web. Today you have a few interesting options and they are not mutually exclusive.
  As consumers wake up to the idea that they can actually reach the internet on their phone, we are about to see an explosion of new mobile devices; ITouch, Kindle, “netbooks” and even Sony Playstation Portable already are rapidly changing the ‘connection’ landscape.
• D u s t y T u n e s | Let your music collection see the light…. – Dusty Tunes automatically creates your own personal web page with a list of all the music in your iTunes library (although you can cheat). It will organise it all into a nice list and provide you with links so you can share it with your friends, on blogs, forums, websites, digg, facebook or simply keep it as a personal reference. You can come back at any time and update your page with all your latest tracks.
• WordPress › SEO Ultimate « WordPress Plugins – SEO Ultimate was developed with WordPress plugin "best practices" in mind:

  * Integration with WordPress's contextual help system
  * Internationalization support
  * Nonce security
  * An uninstall routine
  * Integration with the new WordPress 2.7 menu

• Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.
• WordPress › CMS Navigation « WordPress Plugins – Do you want to use WordPress to create a full website, with easy navigation and menus? This plugin will let you add essential navigation functions to your template.
• WordPress › WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT « WordPress Plugins – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site's navigation.
• Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value – broadstuff – Twitter