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Google Vs Bing in Accuracy

When Microsoft’s Live Search was rebranded Bing in 2009, many critics pointed out that
it seemed to scrape results directly from search engine leader Google. In that year, Google
controlled about 90% of all online searches in the America. It was also considered the most
accurate search engine, period. Now those days are over.

But no more. According to Internet intelligence service Experian Hitwise, Bing topped Google
in accuracy for the month of January 2011. Experian Hitwise rates search engines by entering
random keywords and seeing how relevant the first ten results are. Using this low-tech technique,
Bing and Bing-powered Yahoo Search scored an eyebrow-raising 81% while Google only
managed 65%.

In just two years, Google has lost a significant chunk of its customer base. Google theorizes that
this because of accuracy issues in the first page of results. They base this theory on complaints
they have received. In many cases for niche or very specialized topics, as many as ten of the
top ten results led to articles on “content farms” or sites such as eHow, Associated Content and
Mahalo. Since articles are often not vetted by editors, the quality and accuracy can be iffy.

Now Google found a tangible enemy and began to circle the wagons. In February 2010, Google
began penalizing content farms in order to regain customer trust. Known as the “panda”
algorithm because it would give content farms two black eyes, American content farm traffic
has lowered some sites as much as 94%. An international version of “panda” was introduced by
Google in March.

However, content farms cannot entirely be to blame for Google’s accuracy issues. Bing itself
lists content farm articles consistently somewhere on their top ten results. And when it comes
to getting surfers to click on that all-important link, Google is still gets more clicks than Bing.
Americans prefer Google to surf on Google 68% percent of the time.