Comments on: Fun with Google, Bing, and Yahoo

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:27:41 +0000

Navigational queries are certainly a common case. And I agree that Bing gives special treatment to the "short snout" while Google has more of a long-tail approach that handles queries more uniformly. There are arguments in favor of both approaches. But I suspect that Bing's approach does rely on explicitly favoring particular content sources, which is something I've rarely seen Google do (the exception being Google Public Data. As for the Yahoo! approach, I don't know that it's misleading, but it is certainly tenacious.

By: Bob Carpenter

Bob Carpenter — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:01:36 +0000

I don’t know the numbers, but don’t the big search engines get tons of so-called navigation searches? Even I do it when I’m just too lazy to type in a full URL that I know and don’t have it on auto-complete.

For these searches, the Bing results seem best in the sense of being most informative. But it clearly looks custom made rather than the result of just applying their usual algorithms to the Bing site. For instance, searching for MEDLINE or PubMed doesn’t bring up search boxes.

Yahoo! is pulling up its own search and making it look like Bing’s and Google’s, but you still get Yahoo! That seems more than a bit misleading.

At least it looks like Google just let its general tools create the results, which seems much more above board than either Bing’s or Yahoo!’s approach.

By: Weekly Search & Social News: 12/01/09 | Technoinspire Blog

Weekly Search & Social News: 12/01/09 | Technoinspire Blog — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 11:11:31 +0000

[...] [...]

By: Weekly Search & Social News: 12/01/09 | Search Engine Journal

Weekly Search & Social News: 12/01/09 | Search Engine Journal — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:56:10 +0000

[...] Fun with Google, Bing, and Yahoo – Noisy Channel [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:43:18 +0000

That makes sense–it really doesn’t cost Bing anything relative to providing a link (like Google), and the additional log data may be useful. Yahoo’s approach strikes me as either more bold or more desperate. I’d love to know how often it succeeds in retaining users.

By: William Webber

William Webber — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:57:42 +0000

Ryen White and Sue Dumais of Microsoft Research had a paper at CIKM this year in which they analyzed and categorized user search switching behaviour, and its outcome: Characterizing and predicting search engine switching behavior. I suspect that the reason Bing puts up a search box for Google and Yahoo is not generosity; rather, they want to capture what query it is that you are going to the competing search engine to search for.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:45:22 +0000

At least a lot of people think it is; here are searches for that phone number at Google, Bing, and of course Yahoo.

By: Jonathan Mendez

Jonathan Mendez — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:25:27 +0000

Is that really the Yahoo customer service phone number in the Bing result?

I’ll never badmouth the power of Bing’s relevance again!