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Bing Loves Wikipedia
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
The one thing that keeps me going back to Bing is it's beautiful pictures of places around the world - NOT a great reason to visit a search engine. While checking out todays picture (Harbin! I have been there!) I also thought I would take a quick look at some Bing results and see what was going on.

It seems that Bing loves Wikipedia. Wikipedia is way over represented in their results I think. A search for Sydney brings up 3 entries where Wikipedia is the source information (even though the last one says 'Freebase', the article is from Wikipedia).


Even a search for 'hairdresser' brings up Wikipeda's entry for 'Barber' at number 1. Similarly for 'accountant', but 'builder' has a Wikipedia entry only at number 5. The term 'mobile phone' has Wikipedia at number 2, and the broad and competitive term 'insurance' has Wikipedia at number 1 as well.

I guess the question here is 'intent'.  If you are searching for 'hairdresser', are you looking for a definition? Or would you prefer to use Google, which will give you the name of local hairdressers, in a Google local business entry, plus some other individual sites?

However, since Bing is plastered with ads, (four on top, all down side, two on bottom), there is no shortage of related commercial sites to visit, it is just that they are not ranked by 'relevance' in any way, only price paid.

Is Bing too dependent on Wikipedia? If you trust Wikipedia, perhaps Bing is the search engine for you.


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