Better off with Bing
This excellent article by Lawrence Solomon illustrates why a researcher or investigator must use more than one search engine.
Googlegate: The search engine may be standing up to Chinese censors. What about Google’s own censors?
Search for “Googlegate” on Google and you’ll get a paltry result (my result yesterday was 29,300). Search for “Googlegate” on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine competitor, and the result numbers an eye-popping 72.4 million. If you’re a regular Google user, as opposed to a Bing user, you might not even know that “Googlegate” has been a hot topic for years in the blogosphere — that’s the power that comes of being able to control information.
… Google began to minimize the Climategate scandal by hiding Climategate pages from its users.
Bing, in contrast, didn’t make climategate pages disappear. As you’d expect from a search engine that wasn’t manipulating data, search results on Bing climbed steadily until they peaked at around 51 million…
Sorry, just isn’t true. Try the examples (Googlegate and Climategate) the articles uses and you’ll see there isn’t that much difference.
Alex,
For “climategate” in Google I get about 1,480,000 hits but I get less than 700 results returned. When I include the omitted results, I get less than 1000 based upon 1,420,000 hits. Whereas, Bing returns nearly 51m hits and only delivers 1000.
It seems you will only get about 1000 hits and have to take their word that they have millions more that you can’t see.
But the difference between about 1.5m and 51m seems substantial to me. But, we don’t know what the wizards are doing behind the curtain, and that is why I recommend using multiple search engines, especially with any topic that may be controversial.