A WebmasterWorld thread is having discussion around a new Wired story named Microsoft Says Decaffeinated Bing Tastes as Good as Google. The story basically has Microsoft claiming they aren't necessarily better than Google but they are as good as Google on freshness and search quality.
Here are some quotes:
For good reason, Google has a reputation for using this sort of distributed computing system to reach new heights on the web. But Harry Shum, who oversees research and development for Microsoft's Bing search engine, believes his company has now matched Google's ability to build software platforms that can harness the power of tens of thousands of servers
What Caffeine is good at is freshness - how quickly you can crawl, index and serve documents,” Shum tells Wired. "This is something that we take very, very seriously [at Microsoft]. If you look at the freshness of our queries, I hope you feel that Bing's freshness - search quality in terms of freshness - is at least on par with Google. And, yes, it all starts with the infrastructure.
but Shum believes that Bing has finally reached a point where it can compete with Google on a technical level.
Easy enough for a blogger like me to test. I wrote about Bing's mobile SEO stance (which I think rocks) about 15 minutes ago. A few minutes after writing it, I searched the title tag of the article in both Google and Bing. Google returned the story in both Google News and Web Search at the top of the page. Bing, even 15 minutes later, didn't have the story in their index. Here are screen shots:
Google:
Bing:
At about 20 minutes after publishing the story, Bing has indexed it. Compare that to Google indexing the new story in seconds.
What do you think? Take my poll:
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
