I compare the search results of Google vs. Bing on three terms that I find poorly represented on Google: Hotels, Sheet Music and Feng Shui.

A new article from Techcrunch this morning highlighted a basic but effective mashup of Bing vs. Google. If you read the Techcrunch article you will get a good overview of the comparisons. Naturally, I searched for myself. On Google I own the whole front page with relevant links (the blog, econsultancy profile, brand republic profile etc.) – on Bing there are very similar results, with the addition of jamieriddell.net which I hadn’t registered (I rectified that) so not much to learn from there.

I then looked at three areas in which I don’t get good results, namely hotels, sheet music and Feng Shui.

So lets look for a Hotel in Edinburgh.

To be fair, these results are neck and neck. Both results have sponsored ads, map links (more from Google) and then a list of hotel specific websites, leaving little room for aggregators on either platform.

Sheet Music. I am just starting to learn the piano so I want to find some sheet music. Like Pink Floyd Sheet Music.

For this, Google offers many links to different sites whereas Bing offers fewer links focusing on a handful of websites. The first three natural Google ranks were spammy, offering me further links with little content.  The first link on Bing is totally spammy, but follows with three quality sites offering exactly what I want. I would pick Bing as the winner here for quality of content delivered.

Feng Shui. I have been given a money tree and want to know where I should place that in my room. I tried these searches yesterday. So I searched for, “where do I place a money tree in my room?”

The Google results were just spam filled. Not even one answer to this direct question, including results for real estate less than half way down the page. Bing wins marginally for having slightly better content linked but there wasn’t much in it. For reference I aske dhtat question on Mahalo, Yahoo Answers and Twitter and couldn’t get the answer. I resorted to buying a book!

So, not entirely conclusive at this early stage but Bing has the potential to make me switch if it weren’t for the Google hooks of Gmail, Analytics etc.

How have you found it?

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