Between Google and Bing, which search engine should you focus on? Should you focus on both or prioritize one over the other?
Google is still the world’s most popular search engine and dominant APP store player, but things are changing quickly in an AI-driven world.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and both Bing and Google incorporating AI – i.e., Microsoft Copilot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, Bing Chat, and Google Gemini – into their algorithms and in the search engine results pages (SERPs), things are changing fast.
Let’s explore.
Google Vs. Microsoft Bing Market Share
One of the first distinctions between Microsoft Bing and Google is market share. According to Statcounter, in the US:
Google fell to 86.58%, down from 86.94% in March and 88.88% YoY.
Microsoft Bing grew to 8.24%, up from 8.04% in March and up from 6.43% YoY.
Yahoo grew to 2.59%, up from 2.48% in March and up from 2.33% YoY.
That’s pretty huge to see Bing growing and Google reducing.
Globally
Google had a 91.05% search market share in June 2024, according to Statcounter’s revised data, which is down from 91.38% in March and 92.82% YoY. Google’s highest search market share during the past 12 months, globally, was 93.11% last May.
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. Bing’s usage has grown because of the AI-powered feature Bing Chat, which has attracted new users.
Bing is also used by digital assistants such as Alexa and Cortana.
Bing has around 100 million daily active users which is a number that you can’t ignore. It’s particularly important to optimize for Bing if you’re targeting an American audience. In fact, 28.3% 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
Google
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
Comparing AI Functionality
Feature
Google
Bing
AI Accuracy
Prone to errors
More accurate since it is based on OpenAI GPT-4
Integration
Google Workspace
Microsoft 365 apps (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.)
Image Generation
Handle complex image prompts better than Gemini
Allows users to use existing images as prompts for modifications, a feature not in Copilot
Knowledge Base
Accesses the up-to-date info and has access to the web
Copilot may lag due to potentially outdated databases
Summarizes
Provides concise summaries for content within Google’s ecosystem i.e., YouTube videos or emails
Good at summarizing meetings and writing emails. Etc.
Context Window
Has significantly larger context window of 2 million tokens (or up to 10 million for researchers), allowing it to process much more information at once
Microsoft Copilot (using GPT-4) has a context window of up to 100,000 tokens.
AI in Results
Yes (AI Overviews)
Yes
Focus
Research
Business and customer service applications
Pricing
Similar
Similar
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, especially now with AI overviews. 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 estimate 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.
Differences In User Interface & Tools
Google has a clean, simple interface that many people find easy to use, but for some queries, AI overviews are shown.
Screenshot from search for [bitcoin], Google, July 2024So does Microsoft Bing, though Bing is a little bit more visual.
Screenshot from search for [bitcoin], Microsoft Bing, July 2024Both search engines display useful information about related searches, images, companies, and news and do a great job of informing users of everything they need to know about a given topic.
SEO professionals love our tools and data.
Thankfully, both Google and Microsoft Bing have decent keyword research tools that offer insights into performance:
Screenshot from author, July 2024
One area where I think Google falls behind is the data it provides in Google Search Console. If you want to learn how to use it, check out How to Use Google Search Console for SEO: A Complete Guide.
One of the cool feature sets in Microsoft Bing is the ability to import data from Google Search Console: