Feb 16

Bing versus Google

I think around 2 years ago I had to write a paper at my university about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Since then I check different search engines for their results from time to time. This time it was Bing (Bing.com) and Google (Google.com) - when I wrote the paper, Bing was still MSN Search or whatever its name was.

I use Firefox frequently and switch the search engine in the search box every once in a while. Recently I've been looking for the jquery homepage (www.jquery.com). So, this is what I did (for both search engines):

  1. Open search engine
  2. Enter keyword "jquery" without quotes

The expected result for me was http://www.jquery.com/ to be the first result on both pages - right? In my opinion this would be the most fitting result. Not for Bing I guess. It is on page 1, but it is only number 10 of the search results for me. Google displays the project homepage as result number 1 + Google has a link to the docs of jquery on number 2 of the search results.

Why is that so? What makes Bing think that the official homepage of a project is of less relevance than for example a wikipedia entry about it? Whose answer is 'correct'? In my opinion Google is more correct than Bing in this case and given it is a fairly simple example I wonder what actually causes the different results?

Would be nice to have some discussion on this topic in the comments - maybe you wanna add some of your search engine result differences.