Is it possible that Bing, Microsoft search engine, is more effective than Google? According to a study by Hitwise, the answer is positive when Bing had better relevant results from a sample of 10 million U.S. internet users.

Bing and Yahoo Are More Relevant

Bing and its Bing-powered search engine Yahoo, had better success rates when users made searches that were leading into a website, than Google- Bing and Yahoo had about 80% success rates, where Google had about 67%. Here are the full findings (including data from last month):

A Hit For Google Image?

Google has for years the image of the best search engine that provides much better relevant results, so this study can really shake things up. However, for causing a real damage to Google’s image, more studies and researches have to show similar findings. Also, we should remember that Google search engine can improve at any giving moment rapidly (Remember the Panda updates?).

At any case, i have a few doubts of my own about this study:

1. The results only relates to queries in English, it is pretty safe to assume that the success rates are much different in other languages in favor of Google.

2. The study doesn’t answer how it refers to Google Instant and if queries that are shown during the users typing are also calculated. If so, they can decrease the success rates of Google significantly.

3. I have made a little research of my own about these queries: “Make money online” and “start home business”: While in Google all top 5 results for both queries were quality websites, In Bing none of the top 5 results were valuable (Few scam sites and a few shallow articles).