For the first time ever I can honestly say that Bing has an advantage over Google. When it comes to breaking news, Bing is tops! Let me explain. Yesterday I was watching Rupert Murdoch answering MP’s questions in the house of commons over the phone hacking scandal, when out of the blue a man with a cream pie jumps Rupert Murdoch and attempts to smear the pie all over his face. In utter shock at what was unfolding I jump over to Google to read any breaking news on the event. Who is this guy? Was Rupert Murdoch injured? The live stream was cut and I needed answers.
This is what I found when I googled “Rupert Murdoch cream pie”.
Nada! While twitter was going wild along with the rest of the world, Google was having a nanny nap. Clearly this is a result of Google no longer picking up Twitter’s firehose. Back in the glory days (like a month ago), if you had some breaking news you would simply hit up twitter, post a link, get some retweets then BINGO. A few minutes later you could expect that link to be indexed. Not only that but breaking news would trigger Google realtime results which would quite often appear on the front page of the SERPS.
I then went to Bing to see what I could see.
Bing still has access to Twitter, as a result it was showing relevant, breaking search results. This was the first time I found better results using Bing. I’m not saying Google doesn’t use twitter anymore but clearly they aren’t as connected as they once were.
So how will Google move forward? The answer is Google+. For sure they will use this to pick up realtime data in the future. As for the present, they aren’t using it at all in their search metrics. If they did we would of seen breaking news headlines show up in the SERP’s as quickly as Bing did. I’m sure someone out of the 10,000,000 reported Google + users would have been discussing it.
Only time will tell but for the moment I have to give Bing a +1 for up to the minute results.