Emerging Technologies Blog

The question ''Why aren't the engineers at Microsoft able to make Bing better than Google even though the employees at both companies are equally as smart? first appeared on Quora.
Answer by Balaji Viswanathan, Ex-Developer, Microsoft

Whenever you use a Google service, you are giving the company a key piece of data to bring you the relevant result. As you search more you can notice that the relevance improves for you as the system is far more adaptive. Google knows what you typically search for, what others like you search for, what the current trends are etc. These help you in building the results page.

This data is especially useful for long-tail keywords - search terms rarely used. While a search for Katy Perry [that a lot of people search] would produce a comparable result, a result for a more obscure search - "INS Vishal" would show how big the difference is.

In the search for India's next-gen aircraft carrier, all of Google's top 10 results were relevant. In case of Bing, it misses even the Wikipedia page for INS Vishal, shows the wrong carrier image and brings me links to random LinkedIn profiles.

Each of these searches are made by a few people, but collectively there are millions of these terms and might involve billions of searches. It is in these long tail searches that Bing really loses. This is because very few people search these in the first place [fewer people go to Bing] and thus it gives very less chance for the algorithm to improve itself. Had a few thousand people searched and clicked the results related to the aircraft carrier more Bing would be good too. The low volume would really hurt Microsoft and other builders of search engines. On the other hand, Google could get a few hundred searches for most of these keywords and can build a better experience from the past searches.