Bug testers: Google is clean, Bing is buggy
Google was the favorite search engine of independent bug testers who scoured the search landscape for bugs.
(Credit: uTest)An independent search engine bug bash gave high marks to Google's bug testers and found that while Bing is buggy, it's also doing a lot of things right.
A company called uTest solicited 1,100 software developers and set them loose on the four major search engines of the day: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Google's new Caffeine update. Google had the fewest number of bugs and the least severe bugs among the competition, while Bing amassed the most bugs yet still scored well in the accuracy of its results.
uTest solicits bug testers with cash rewards for the quality of the bugs they discover, and pitches the service to companies as an outsourced QA department. It turned participants loose on the search engines for a week in August and only accepted bugs that were judged as new and unknown to those outside the company that developed the search engine.
Some interesting tidbits highlighted by the study:
• Google was targeted by 85 percent of the bug hunters but held up to the scrutiny, producing the fewest number of severe bugs and a relatively low total overall. Nearly half the bugs reported with Google were functional, as opposed to technical or GUI (graphical user interface) related.
• As the newest kid on the block it might not be a surprise that Microsoft's Bing had the largest number of bugs reported, accounting for more than half the total bugs reported during the survey. Perhaps more importantly for Microsoft, despite the bugs, survey testers were largely impressed with Bing and delivered high praise for its user interface.
• Yahoo's gradual exit from the search market is under way, but it was the least-buggy search engine in the mix probed by uTest's army. Still, testers ranked Yahoo third behind Google and Bing in page load speed, real-time relevance, and overall accuracy.
• Google's Caffeine update is not even a production search engine, but uTest gave it a run anyway just to see what they could find. Caffeine actually had fewer unknown bugs than Yahoo, but that's a bit deceptive since the list of known bugs is long and because most testers chose not to examine Caffeine. Still, testers were very impressed with the speed of the Caffeine update, which was Google's main priority with the overhaul.
The complete list of results and details for each search engine tested can be found here (PDF).
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
www.bing.com/visualsearch
(requires silverlight)
I am also guessing he missed this part "survey testers were largely impressed with Bing and delivered high praise for its user interface."
Do they actually affect anyone in a negative way?
Were the identified bugs notified to the three search engines so they can fix them if they actually cause anyone any harm?
- Functional bugs are defects against "functional" requirements (how you'd expect the product's features to work). If you turn off the "search history" yet it still appears occasionally, that's a functional bug. If you type "1+1" into the search bar and it calculates "42", that's another bug.
- Technical bugs (also called "non-functional" bugs) don't relate to particular features of the product per se, but usually involve quality of service issues. Technical bugs might involve speed / capacity, availability, security, etc. Example: suppose a search engine takes minutes to return results if a query contains more than three "AND" constructs. It still functions (returns relevant results), but there is a serious performance issue.
- GUI bugs can refer to layout / GUI coding issues but also involve usability. Example: maybe if you hover over an image, a large pop-up appears that's overflows small screens (like those using netbooks). Functionally it works but clearly there's a GUI problem.
If your users are looking for porn and you block Bing, they are going to use another search engine and find porn, it will just take them more time (or get them worse porn).
I see absolutely no logic in what you are doing.
It's just simpler to block Bing.
So thus we explain why the primary users of Bing are not tech savvy and the primary users of Google are.
requires silverlight
silverlight
... you lost my patronage, Visual Search.
- by krishnashekhar01 October 6, 2009 12:05 AM PDT
- Have you ever tried out Bing Image results?
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(29 Comments)Try it out...Its different....