44

[Jedster]

I needed to find images relating to the number 44.
When I used bing, almost every picture was of a gun.
When I used google, there were only 3 or 4 that were guns.

Any comments on the difference of the search engines. (I have hardly ever used bing before).

 

[Sunstone]

No idea why or how that could happen. But what a fascinating fact!

 

[Heyo]

Duckduckgo also gives lots of guns (~80%), the rest are birthday greetings, road signs and the occasional other thing that has a 44 in the title like Psalm 44, T-Shirt 44 and Bugatti Type 44.
The differences could be due to all kinds of factors. Some lay more weight on title, others more on tags or impact weight of the page but I suspect that google has actively redacted the results as they are known to do.

 

[Heyo]

Try ".44" and Google will give you all the guns you want.

 

[ChristineM]

I guess it's down to the different priorities of the search algorithms.

 

[Jedster]

I guess it's down to the different priorities of the search algorithms.

Could be political, ie gun-lobby enthusiasts having influence...just sayin'

 

[Heyo]

Could be political, ie gun-lobby enthusiasts having influence...just sayin'

I have expressed the same suspicion above but it could be that googles search algorithm is just a bit more sophisticated. Most people who search for guns or ammunition will say "forty four" but enter ".44" for their search. I.e. most people entering "44" are not looking for guns.

 

[Terry Sampson]

My search engine of choice is Google; and here are some of the images that I got when I entered "44" and clicked on "Images" in the top-line menu. Quite a few before guns show up.

 

[ChristineM]

Could be political, ie gun-lobby enthusiasts having influence...just sayin'

To a point. Search engine optimization is an art in itself. Specific search engine algorithms look for different things. Bing being the most popular search engine in the US will mean the gun lobby optimise their sites for bing.

That same optimization is useless on google which is more interested in user experience and readability, hence the much less occurrences of guns.

Whereas duckduckgo uses a different scheme entirely and serves up different results for the same search criteria?

It used to be that websites could detect which search bot was looking at their site and either rewrite or redirect do the bot returned a good score. I know Google can detect this now and mark down when its detected so its not used.

 

[Rival]

Bing is good for image porn.

Not kidding; it's loads better. I realised this when I had a Windows phone and Bing was default.

Bing for porn & violence, I guess.