Google and Microsoft Bing are the largest search engines that satisfy users’ informational needs every day. Let’s explore a detailed comparison of the two here.
When it comes to optimizing a website, SEO professionals typically focus on Google. After all, it’s the world’s most popular search engine.
But what about Microsoft Bing? Is it worth optimizing your site for, as well?
Let’s see how these two search giants, Microsoft Bing (rebranded from simply ‘Bing’ in October 2020) and Google, compare.
Google vs. Microsoft Bing Market Share
One of the first distinctions between Microsoft Bing and Google is market share. According to Statista, in February 2021, Bing accounted for 6.7% of the global search market, while Google took 86.6%.
That’s pretty huge.
And while that may make it tempting to focus on Google alone, Microsoft Bing provides good conversions and has a user base that shouldn’t be ignored.
That 6.7% of search users accounts for millions who use Microsoft Bing every day.
It’s particularly important to optimize for Bing if you’re targeting an American audience. In fact, one-third of online queries in the U.S. are powered by Microsoft properties when you factor in Yahoo and voice searches.
Some have wondered over the years whether Bing is an acronym for “Because It’s Not Google.” I’m not sure how true that is, but the name does come from a campaign in the early 1990s for its predecessor, Live Search.
Another fun tidbit is that Ahrefs recently did a study on the Top 100 Bing searches globally and the #1 query searched was [Google].
Comparing Google vs. Microsoft Bing’s Functionality
From a search functionality perspective, the two search engines are similar, but Google offers more core features:
| Feature | Microsoft Bing | |
| Text Search | Yes | Yes |
| Video Search | Yes | Yes |
| Image Search | Yes | Yes |
| Maps | Yes | Yes |
| News | Yes | Yes |
| Shopping | Yes | Yes |
| Books | Yes | No |
| Flights | Yes | No |
| Finance | Yes | No |
| Scholarly Literature | Yes | No |
How Google & Microsoft Bing Differ in Size of Index and Crawling
Google says:
“The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.”
Even so, not even Google can crawl the entire web. That is just not going to happen.
This is why using structured data is so important. It provides a data feed about your content so Google can understand it better, which can help you qualify for rich results and get more clicks and impressions.
Microsoft Bing hasn’t released similar figures. However, this search engine index size estimating website puts the Microsoft Bing index at somewhere between 8 to 14 billion web pages.
The two engines have shared a little about their approaches to web indexing.
Microsoft Bing says:
“Bingbot uses an algorithm to determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. The goal is to minimize bingbot crawl footprint on your web sites while ensuring that the freshest content is available.”
Around the same time the above statement was made, John Mueller from Google said:
“I think the hard part here is that we don’t crawl URLs with the same frequency all the time. So some URLs we will crawl daily. Some URLs maybe weekly. Other URLs every couple of months, maybe even every once half year or so. So this is something that we try to find the right balance for, so that we don’t overload your server.”
Google has a mobile-first index, while Microsoft Bing takes a different stance and does not have plans to apply a mobile-first indexing policy.
Instead, Microsoft Bing maintains a single index that is optimized for both desktop and mobile, so it is important to make sure your site experience is optimized, loads quickly, and gives users what they need.
Google has evolved into more than just a search engine with products like Gmail, Maps, Chrome OS, Android OS, YouTube, and more.
Microsoft Bing also offers email via Outlook, as well as other services like Office Online or OneDrive.
Unlike Google, however, it does not have its own operating system. Instead, it uses Windows Phone 8 or iOS on Apple devices.
Now, let’s take a look at where Bing is on par with Google – or superior.
