Bing vs. Google face-off, round 1

The best price on a 1 TB hard drive This is the kind of search that an amateur system builder might perform at any time: What's the best price and supplier for a one-terabyte internal hard drive?

Bing's prediction engine for queries in progress behaved in championship fashion here. The moment we typed "1 TB," it offered "1 TB hard drive" and "1 TB external hard drive" as possible completions. Choosing the first one brought up a page where 1 TB HDDs were mentioned, where Seagate perched atop the list with specifications of its Barracuda 7200.11. That's not exactly prices, but in fairness, that's not what we chose from the completion list.

Finding a price list in Bing is simple: There's a bold "Shopping" link along the left side navigation bar. When we click that, we get a well formatted list showing both internal and external drives (it's easy to tell which is which), sorted by "best match" -- the most likely entries to match this rather general query. Price is a clear and obvious sorting criterion here, and one click on that hoists the entry for the Barracuda 7200.12 to the top of the page, with at least one store asking (apparently) $54.

Not all entries are associated with user reviews, though the prominence of the feature now called Bing Cashback does give Bing an edge here, offering as much as 8% return for buying an HDD found on Bing. A click on this drive gives you a complete list of stores and prices (though we doubt the CompSource listing pricing the drive at $1,417.17 has been updated recently). So Bing takes the shopper through the complete decision process -- some online retailers will appreciate this, others won't. But it does provide a complete answer, and it'll be hard for Google to compete.

Google's predictor came to the same conclusion Bing's did about our query. Selecting "1 TB hard drive" took us to a page that presented some shopping results right up front -- Bing's hid them away behind the Shopping link. Clicking on "Shopping results for 1 TB hard drive" takes us to Google Product Search (formerly known as "Froogle," and we miss the old brand name), where once again we see a complete and relatively well formatted list of options. Changing the sort order to Price: low to high catapulted a Western Digital refurbished drive to the top of the list, at $68.42. Clicking on that entry takes us directly to the store making that offer.

What's missing here? Well, first of all, that wasn't the best price for a 1 TB hard drive, at least based on available data. There's no cashback offer (for folks looking for that extra $1.08), and instead of comparing stores that offer the same drive, we're jumping back and forth between different stores. Sure, we can proceed straight to Google Checkout with a number of these services, but we don't know enough about the drive and the prices and the stores yet to make that decision. Bing's service was a tad more complete in this department, so we're giving Bing the nod in heat #2. That ties the score at one-all.

What's going on in North Korea?

If you're a concerned citizen of the planet, you may be worried about some of the recent militaristic displays of audacity and pomposity coming from the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea. At the time of this writing, there's been some news hints about the possible test firing of a long-range missile theoretically capable of reaching the shores of Alaska.
Now, a typical Internet user may go to a trusted news source directly for headlines -- frankly, that's probably what most folks online will do. But not all folks are "most folks," and some will use the tool in front of their face, first. That could be the Google Toolbar, and that could be Bing's new alternative.

Without performing any journalistic feat of its own, Google has already made a name for itself in news, by fast becoming the Internet's pre-eminent distributor of headlines. If I happen to type the query "North Korea" test, complete with quotation marks, into Google's main query line (not the Google News page), my search results begin with a collection of the first few headlines in Google's collection about North Korea's little escapades. Up front is "North Korea carries out two more weapons test," dateline five days ago, and linking to The Irish Times.

We have nothing against Ireland or The Irish Times. But if Google were to really put its alleged smarts to good use on this feature, including its good sense of geolocation, it should conclude 1) we're not in Ireland; 2) we're not asking about Ireland. All that notwithstanding, Google should also conclude that on a major news issue such as North Korea, a five-day-old article from anyplace is no longer newsworthy.

Did Bing fare any better? Giving it the same "North Korea" test query, at the very top of the first batch of news-related items at the top of the page was a headline dated one hour ago. One hour old versus five days old means it's newsworthy. Now, the source of the news is News.com.au (no relation to CNET), a pre-eminent Australian online news service. Again, the service could be smarter -- Australia may be closer to North Korea than Ireland, but it's still not really there.

Nonetheless, on this particular point, Bing did a bit better job -- a "C" compared to an "F" on newsworthiness. And that gives Bing the edge over Google at the end of Round 1, with the score Bing 2, Google 1.
We're not through testing Google vs. Bing, and we'd like to get you involved. Give us some examples of some hard queries or research assignments, and we'll put these two search engines through their paces. For now, we're limiting our tests to Bing and Google -- Yahoo will just have to wait in the wings for now, maybe to take on the champion in a later match.