Microsoft made a rather bold claim at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto earlier this week. The company claims that its search engine, Bing, offers "more relevant" results than Google.
The Verge reports Microsoft as saying that Bing search results are more relevant than Google's for the first time in history. The Redmond-based software giant claimed Bing has 61.4 percent "overall relevance" compared to Google's 59.9 percent. However, Microsoft did not offer any explanations on how these figures were computed, or any details about the factors that contribute towards this "overall relevance".
In the absence of any details, it is hard to take Microsoft's claims seriously, especially since Google continues to dominate in terms of market, as well as mind-share. Last we checked, no one was asking their friends to "just Bing it".
It's not all doom and gloom for Microsoft and Bing, especially in the US market. Kevin Turner, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer, shared at the Worldwide Partner Conference that the US search market-share for Bing went from 14.38 percent in June 2011 to 15.41 percent in May 2012.
When you include "powered by Bing" searches (like Yahoo!), the number goes up to 25.63%. In other words, one in four searches in US, is now powered by Bing, which is not so bad after all.