Bing is the renamed search engine recently released by Microsoft, and, whilst it’s like its competitor Google in many ways, it has a number of its own nuances – in terms of end-user experience and search results – that make it a viable alternative to the market leader.
Search Engine Algorithm
Search engines use a number of different signals to deduce page relevance and ranking. These include titles, URL content and keyword density as well as a myriad of other contributing factors, such as page popularity, length and quality. Algorithms are created to assign value to certain pages and produce the best results. Because of the complex nature of these search engine algorithms, however, there is no set way to build them.
Site Relevance & Quality
There are many trivial differences between Google and Bing, such as layout of the homepage and search engine results page, but the main difference between the two is the way each system’s algorithm differs. Whilst it doesn’t seem to incorporate any new signals when evaluating a given site’s relevance, Bing gives noticeably more weight than Google to certain signals.
- Bing pays more attention to keywords and keyword phrases present in URLs.
- Bing puts a much greater emphasis on capitalised terms.
- Bing displays pages from larger sites more often than smaller sites.
Both companies, of course, won’t release how their algorithms are made up, but their effectiveness is measured by end-user experience and satisfaction.
Bing has a very small percentage of query volume compared to Google (3.16% against 85.35%), but Google has a number of years on Bing. The fact that Bing is implementing different strategies will highlight how effective both algorithms are as time goes on.
