Bing: Here’s 7 Ways Our Image Search Is Better Than Google

Microsoft’s Meenaz Merchant, Senior Program Manager at Bing, posted a behind the scenes look at why Bing is a better image search engine than Google.

Here are the seven examples on scenarios on why Bing is better than Google with image search, as described on the Bing blog.

(1) Entity Understanding – Bing says while they understand if a search is about a person, place or thing and then show images based on that understanding. Google does not. “Bing is able to understand the primary intent of the search and find relevant images,” said Bing. Then they added why Google doesn’t work to well, saying “Google has taken a different approach where they show images of the Prince and Princess as a couple and in social settings, interpreting the entity in a different way.”

(2) Big Data – Bing says they use image click data from the Web and social signals. They combine this user interaction data with visual and text features. They imply Google only uses visual and text features, not click data and social signals. They then show an example of Snow White portraits.

(3) Computer Vision Technologies – Bing says they algorithms work more like humans at interpreting images as would a human brain. Does Google’s image search algorithms work like a human?

(4) Thematic Intent Focus – Instead of using web search algorithms to be focused on the exact intent of the specific words, they often go with the broader theme unlike Google.

(5) Exact and Near Duplicates – Bing says they are better at filtering out exact or near duplicate images than Google.

(6) At A Glance Views – Bing says it is better to show “multiple images at a glance rather than dig through web pages to find the right image” and while Bing does this, Google does not.

(7) Higher Quality Images – Bing uses higher quality images as part of their algorithm, in fact they say the algorithm “prefers high quality images to low quality images.” Google, well, they show the opposite.

I should note, I am fairly certain Google can turn this around on Bing and show seven examples of how and why Google is better at image search than Bing.