Here recently when I use google, I feel like I'am in a Bing TV commercial. Even if I know the exact phrase, and do a search for it, all kinds of unrelated topics comes up. Its only when I put a search phrase in quotes do I get related results. Looking at my google analytics account: Google traffic has an average bounce rate of around 55% Bing has an average bounce rate of around 23% 30% is a big number, for anything, much less a search engine. I dont know about yall, but its gotten to the point where I can not find anything in google. I find myself having to use bing and yahoo more and more because google search results are becoming less accurate. On monday I ordered an item off of amazon - it was being shipped through a third party. I got an email yesterday saying the product had shipped, and the name of the company that shipped it. I did a google search for the company that shipped the product, and the name of the product that I ordered, and all kinds of unrelated stuff came up. As far as I'am concerned, the quality of google search results has taken a nose dive over the past 6+ months.
I can't say I've had that experience yet. However, I've noticed Bing has sent us some pretty good quality traffic. I was searching for a particular username a few weeks back and Bing had results Google didn't and vice versa. I've caught myself using the Bing search a couple times now, and I feel like it's a legitimate competitor to Google.
Bing is a nice engine, but it will always be looked down upon because its built by Microsoft. I don't see it overtaking google, but I've been getting great traffic with really low bounce rates from them as well.
Its like today, I did a search for the title of a video I posted on youtube last night. Its about a pod that people take hiking, camping,,,,,. Instead of giving the results, google gives this, Uh, no. That is not at all what I typed in. This past weekend I was looking for information on ad placement in vbulletin. So I typed in something about ad placement in vbulletin. Instead of stuff about vbulletin, I get ad placement in drupal. I'am thinking to myself - "vbulletin has nothing to do with drupal, where are these results coming from?" A search this morning is giving better results then last night. Google video feature is about useless - all it gives back is youtube and google video results. Its like google is ignoring other video sites and trying to drive traffic just to youtube. Sometimes (but rarely) will results come back from metacafe, dailymotion,,,, sites like that. But its mostly youtube. -- edit -- -- Example -- This past weekend Jasper, Texas got some good snow. If you go to google, do a search for snow storm jasper texas - then click on images. The first image is of the klu klux klan. How is the KKK related to snow in jasper texas? Its not. some of the other image results include Vancouver Eclipse Set Snow Storm at Sea [Figure: CAMP IN SNOW New Orleans Snow Sarver of Jasper Jasper TX - D + A None of which are related to the snow in jasper last weekend. Google has gotten to the point where it is displaying totally unrelated results.
Maybe their uber accelerated crawling is not as accuarate as other engines O.O I'm very concerned about it as I'm a big fan of Google. I can't tell for sure though. Maybe they are focusing more on other big projects?
That's because when you used the words "snow + storm" it pulled images from a server that caters to stormfront, a "whites only" forum, which last time I checked, no one there is remotely white, which makes me laugh. Bing never works for me, Google does, Yahoo! is off the grid.
I'm going to have to do some testing and see how Bing performs compared to Google with my sites. I'll also have to take a look at my Google Analytics stats. You've really got me curious, Kevin.
There were lots of people that had posted pictures of the snow on their blogs - including me. I even used the title - alt tags to tell google what the images were about. Then I waited about 2 days, did a search for my images (or any other images of the snow) and none were to be found. My opinion - this reflects very poorly on google. The search engine was displayed totally unrelated results to a simple search.
