Google vs. Bing – Which To Choose?

A long time ago, Yahoo! was the search engine of choice. Well, more of a directory than a search engine, there was a time when they were king of the hill.

Along came InfoSeek, Lycos, Altavista, Excite and a number of other search engines, including Microsoft\’s MSN. By building the browser into the operating system, Microsoft hoped to dominate the web. It didn\’t work out that way.

Google launched and seized the majority of search traffic with their superior algorithmic formulas. My, how quickly things can change.

Here we are in 2013. Google is still dominating the search space, but Microsoft\’s Bing.com has come on the scene with some fairly impressive features.

I\’ve tested both and the results are fairly similar. However, I have made a choice as to which search engine will be my default going forward.

I did a simple search for my name. Being the only \”joel comm\” in the world, the majority of search results are directly related to me.

Google returned 987,000 results. My blog comes up first, along with the Google Connect photo. That\’s a good sign.

It\’s followed by my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles. Next is my Wikipedia page. Also good.

Google then tosses in some images of me, my YouTube channel, my iTunes search results and a couple websites that reference me. Of course going through other pages would reveal all kinds of content.

The right column pulls in my Wikipedia bio, but the associated photo is not the one that appears on my wiki page. In fact, it\’s from six years ago.

Three of my books appear under my photo, but not my most recent title, KaChing.

Then Google suggests that people who search for me also search for Mike Filsaime, Jason Calacanis, T. Harv Eker and Tony Robbins.

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Now let\’s turn our attention to Bing.

First of all, Bing gave me 1,100,000 results. Big smile. :-)

But even more impressive is the content that Bing created on the results page.

First of all, my blog ranks at the top and a number of sub-links are featured. It chose popular articles to list underneath the main header.

Next up is my Wiki page with a current photo, my LinkedIn profile with a photo, my Amazon results, Twitter profile with photo, eBay page, YouTube page and Google Plus page!

The center column features my Klout bio, photo and score. This was surprisingly pleasant to find.

The right column features my social results, pulling from Facebook and Twitter. I think this is important as the social networks are the best source for current search results. They demonstrate what people are talking about now. I like that photos of people who are engaging with my via social appear in the results as well. While I appreciate my main profiles being on the front page of both search engines, the social results measure the current pulse much better.

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The bottom line? I have officially changed my default search engine to use Bing. Google already owns too much of my personal information.

I recognize that there are other search choices, but I think I\’m going to try Bing for a while and see if it continues to serve me.

What search engine do you prefer and why? Please use the comments form below to share your thoughts!