Accounting for more than two-thirds of all Web searches in the U.S., Google’s (News 
- Alert) dominant place atop the search engine pyramid is unquestioned. But if you are looking for effectiveness, you may want to look elsewhere, a new study suggests.
Research firm Experian Hitwise released a report last week that found Google does a generally poor job of finding users what they are looking for. Shockingly, only 66.7 percent of all searches run through Google’s engine in July were successful, meaning a user clicked on at least one link from the results page.
In contrast, Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Bing sported a success rate of around 80 percent. Meanwhile, Yahoo, which uses the Bing engine to power its search page, yielded a success rate of more than 81 percent. The month-over-month percentage changes were minimal, so it wasn’t just a bad July for Google.
“The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information,” Experian Hitwise said in a statement.
The reason for the rather extreme disparity goes unexplained by the research firm and remains a bit of a mystery. Typing the same query into Bing and Google bring back similar results, if not identical, for the majority of searches. Both engines provide auto-complete functionality and additional weather, time and conversion information on the top of pages, so one would assume that searches that don’t necessitate clicking on links would cancel each other out.
It’s difficult to believe that Google is that much less effective than Bing, but it’s even harder to ignore the consistent story that the data tells each month. Maybe Google isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Either way, Bing is making a bit of a push in the search race, albeit a small one. Bing-powered searches represented 28.05 percent of all U.S. queries in July, up from 27.68 percent in June.
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Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
