Q: How much does Bing suck? A: A lot!

A few days ago when Bing was released in preview, I wrote a post about giving Bing a shot at being my default search engine for a while.

I tried hard to give Bing a go. I tried to pry myself away from the warm, fuzzy satisfied feeling of a Google search.

I tried, but Bing failed. Sure Bing can take my search terms and return results but Google can answer my questions and that’s what I need a search engine to do.

For example, let’s say I want to ask “what is the average life span of a blue whale”.

Google blows Bing out of the water (no pun intended), it’s not even close.

Bing search results for “what is the average life span of a blue whale“:

• The first result returned by Bing is some desultory post from Wheelock.edu message board from 2005 that does in fact mention the lifespan of whales, unfortunately it’s in reference to bowhead whales not blue whales which is what we searched for.
• The second result returned by Bing is a Wikipedia article, which is usually a pretty good sign, sadly the Wikipedia page that Bing turns up is an entry on “Maximum life-span” and while the word whale does appear once on the page, not only does it have nothing to do with blue whales, it has nothing to with whales at all.
• The third result returned by Bing is yet another haphazard post from Wheelock.edu message board, this one dated February 21, 2000! Ironically this result is the only one so far that is actually about blue whales but it still somehow manages to be the worst result of all. The post contains someone asking for facts about the blue whale and someone responding, “I don’t happen to have those measurements at hand, but the best source would be a book called The Blue Whale”.

I’ll stop there because the next result returned by Bing is actually about the life cycle of an adult elephant (seriously), so if you’re not banging your head against a wall by now, you may be on your way to your local bookstore to buy a copy of a book called The Blue Whale so you can actually figure out the answer to your question since Bing is apparently totally clueless.

Now, let’s compare and contrast that with Google, the search engine we all know and love.

Google search results for “what is the average life span of a blue whale“:

There’s no need to even make a list here. The very first result returned by Google is a to a site called Blue-Whale.info and the name of the post is “Life Span of Blue Whales“. Not only does it give you lots of other information on blue whales it clearly states:

Blue whales have a life expectancy of 35-40 years, but the normal, un-hunted lifespan of a blue whale is estimated to be 80 years.

Not only does it answer our question it gives us a better, more specific answer than what we asked for.

Anyone that may have been hoping that Bing had the chance to be a Google killer is advised to keep on looking. Google runs rings around Bing and it’s hard to imagine that Bing will even have the opportunity to get off the ground anytime soon. Not that it has to of course, Microsoft has the resources and is already used to keeping things around that lose, rather than make, money.

It’s not really shocking that that Google is better at search than Bing, that is to be expected. Google is the standard. To me, the truly shocking aspect of this is the magnitude of the disparity between Bing and Google.

I tried to give Bing a chance to usurp Google as my default search engine of choice, but with results so incredibly bad, it’s hard to justify not sticking with Google.

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