Which is the better search engine, Bing or Google?

Every once in a while I hear the question: Which is a better browser, Bing or Google?  Like most questions like this, the answer isn’t one or the other, but each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

User Experience:

I like clean, simple, and straightforward software.  Applications that do everything under the sun generally annoy me.  Google’s home page is obviously pretty simple.  You see the Google logo (or a variation of it), a search box, and little else of note.  It’s pretty simple to understand.  Bing, though, somehow managed to keep the simplicity of Google but add a background image to the search page with areas that you can learn more about the image.  If you want the simplicity, it’s available to you.  If you want a quick distraction and want to learn something at the same time, Bing can provide that easily too.

Winner: Bing

Searching for numerical information:

If you are looking for prices for airfare, hotels, gadgetry, etc., you’re probably looking at several sites and comparing prices.  Though Google appears to be changing, Google’s primary approach to this situation is trying to give you links to sites that have price comparisons, such as expedia.com.  Bing, on the other hand, has the ability to look at all of these websites, pull the information off of them, and then gives you the best prices based on the times you give it.  No more jumping from site to site trying to get the best price!

Winner: Bing

Searching for qualitative information:

Sometimes, when on the internet, you need to find information that is not easily compared or quantified.  I find myself wanting to search for this type of information often while at work looking up a new technique or trying to troubleshoot an obscure error.  Google has a great ability to give relevant results containing all of the important search terms.  Bing, on the other hand, does a relatively poor job with qualitative searches.  It tends to ignore some of the search terms as it sees fit, and will sometimes correct your spelling without giving you an option to override the correction.

Winner: Google

Searching for my blog

Most of the people that come to this blog from search engines come from Bing.  To see why, I put in some search terms that I thought were relevant to my blog, and my blog was on the first page on Bing.  My blog didn’t appear in the first five pages of results on Google.  I’m not an SEO expert, so I don’t know why, but it’s clear that Bing loves me more than Google does.

Winner: Bing

Conclusion

If I’m searching for anything that can be counted or compared, I use Bing to get the information I need.  Its greatest strength is pulling information from sites so I don’t have to go there myself.  If I’m looking for something more obscure, or if I’m looking for something that would easily be contained on a single site, Google is usually my choice.  When in doubt, I start with Bing, but jump to Google if I don’t see any meaningful results in the first page.