Bing and Translators

I'm not looking to trade search engines, but I decided to kick Bing's tires after reading a New York Times review of it by David Pogue. In short, he says Bing is better at providing you with concierge-type information. So if you search for a particular camera model, it gives you a nifty chart of features and prices at different sellers. Movie times, driving directions, etc.

Because I'm not the concierge in my family, that's not how I use the internet most days. The gold mine for me is a digital, searchable, real book or a relevant online trade journal. So I decided to follow the columnist's advice and pop over to http://bing-vs-google.com/ to run my recent search for information on земляника in comparison mode.

Bing handed me an excerpt from the book "The Strawberry: History, Breeding and Physiology" by G.M. Darrow. When I looked up from reading, half an hour had gone by. This was good stuff. Then Google reminded me about Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, and when I looked up from reading that another half an hour was gone (and I've read this one before!).

A tie.

Then I searched for information on Russia+arbitrazh.

Bing came back with a long list of Russian sites that mention the word арбитраж in Russian. I intentionally searched for the transcripted word because I was looking for English-language commentary, but Bing ignored that. I also noticed that most of the sites were law firms offering to represent you in an arbitrazh court. Is that a symptom of the concierge focus Pogue mentioned? Does Bing assume that if you're searching for something it's because you want to buy it (or buy your way out of it)?

Google brought back a number of articles written by US/UK lawyers and NGOs about the state of Russia's arbitrazh courts. That's more the kind of thing I'm usually looking for.

To get a better picture of their differences, I kept the Bing v. Google site open to do all my searching during a normal day of work. Time and again, Bing handed me results that: 1) ignored aspects of my search query (like quotation marks!) or 2) were links to spammy sites where my search term appeared to be a random entry.

For now, I'm sticking with Google.