Like Coca Cola and Pepsi, there is always going to be a comparison between Google and Bing. But which one of them works better? The answer is there is no answer, individual results are always going to be tailor made by search history, location and whatever other secrets are included in the Search Engine algorithm that makes personalised web searches personal. So what can we do if everything’s subjective? We shall run a case study!
Recently CERN who basically created the origins of what we now call the World Wide Web have decided to host a copy of the First Ever Website back on its original domain. It’s been hosted elsewhere since then by W3C. You can view the very first website ever at it’s original domain address here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
But how does Google and Bing manage search requests for the first ever website? We’ll test that now. by entering “First Website Ever” into Google and Bing respectively. We’ll add a control to this little experiment and we’ll start be searching the URL first. See the Results below:
Google Returns: The first website ever at it’s original URL. Followed by CERN’s modern website. Followed by two more results from CERN.
Bing Returns: The first website ever at it’s original URL. Followed by CERN’s modern website. Followed by a few news articles and then a wiki.
So the first two results are exactly the same. No real surprise there as we were using a very specific search term. But it’s interesting to see how Google continues to list CERN’s website and Bing chose to list news items related to the search term. Which do you prefer?
So now lets really put it to the test and search for “First Website Ever”. See results below:
Google Returns: The first website Ever. Followed by Cern’s website. Followed by News relating to the first ever website.
Bing Returns: A copy of the the first ever website hosted on W3.org. Then followed by CERN’s modern website.
A clear win for Google then. But like I’ve mentioned above, there are a lot of factors that affect rankings and localisation is definitely one of them. So give this little test a go and let me know how you get on.
Blog By: Greg McVey
