subject: Bing - Can the Search Engine Compete With Google? [print this page] Bing - Can the Search Engine Compete With Google?
Because of it's structure the well known web would be only a huge collection of domains and web pages. Without search engines it would be extremely difficult to find anything. The main purpose of the websites is to publish things to be found by other people. If nobody comes to our site because nobody knows that it exists then all our efforts to create interesting content are useless. Therefore, web search engines are very important for the web to function by just (at least in theory) publishing pages.
We can easily find out how important search engines are just by looking at ourselves. Whenever we need something we go first to the browser and use our favorite engine to search for the thing. The fact is that most people that search the web use Google as the search engine. The reason for this is very simple. Google has significant market share because it returns highly relevant search results. And providing relevant search results is not an easy task.
There is a now a big business called search engine optimization or SEO. It means creating or modifying web pages and creating various backlinks in order to achieve high rankings in search engines. SEO activities contributed significantly to the fact that now it is extremely difficult to select relevant pages for arbitrary search phrase. There are many spam sites that have no value for people searching the web. This means that for a successful web search engine you need to have resources to crawl the entire web and superb algorithms to get quality search results.
Google has here a big advantage. One of the first brilliant approaches used to search the web and rank pages was the PageRank algorithm. This is a very powerful way of evaluating relevancy of any page by just evaluating all the links that point to this page. This algorithm is an important factor to select relevant pages. However, because the basic principle of this algorithm is publicly known a lot of webmaster started to aggressively create backlinks at every possible places. Of course, PageRank is not the only algorithm used to rank pages. Google said that it uses more than 200 different parameters to rank pages. This clearly shows how difficult it is to search the whole web.
Bing on the other hand tries to use different algorithms for the same goal: to serve high quality relevant search results. But the market share clearly shows that Google still manages to maintain very high quality and relevancy of results. Unless Bing or any other search engine discovers a magic formula, this situation will not change for quite some time.
One of the factors that play a role in ranking is also page loading time. Pages that need long time to load cause bad user experience and search engines treat them accordingly. The simplest way to decrease loading times is to use simple page layout like in the case of the pizza ovens website. Because of the lightweight layout there are only few page elements that need to be downloaded. This significantly contributes to short page loading time. Of course, lightweight website does not mean that good pizza can not have many different toppings.
