One aspect of taking control of your personal finances is to educate yourself and many of us use .jpg)
the world wide web to learn about personal finance topics that are relevant to us. Last week, Microsoft launched its new web search engine “Bing.” Like the most popular search tool Google, Bing uses a secret formula to find answers to questions. I decided to test both of these remarkable tools to see which gave me better information about personal finance topics. You can find Bing on the home page of msn.com and the Google search engine is available here.
Before I started the search, I set two rules. First, I was looking for information from reliable sources. As a result, if a search placed information from Wikipedia high on the list, the search engine sank in my review. As with information from any source (human, web or book), trust but verify and Wikipedia is not trustworthy when it comes to your money.
Second, the engine that put fewer ads at the top of the search list received a higher review.
The first topic I entered in the tool bar for both engines was the term “personal finance.” Google had one ad at the top of the search list and no mention of Wikipedia (yea!). Bing had three ads and Wikipedia was the fourth item listed. Other than that, both search engine lists had similar results, with Bing listing a new web site with potential I didn't know about called Saving Advice, which is a web site that “teaches you how to invest, save money and pay down debt.” Still, advantage to Google on this search.
I tried the words “asset allocation” for the next search. Bing listed three ads at the top of the list and the first site listed was Wikipedia (boo). Google list two ads at the top of its search list and Wikipedia was first on its list too (boo again). While there were some differences in the list of the two engines, there was not much difference so I called this comparison even.
Finally, I searched on the term “investment risk.” Google had one ad at the top of its list and Wikipedia was again the first item in its list. Bing had no ads (yea), but Wikipedia was first on its list as well. Again, both search engines cited similar web sources for information, but I favor the sites from Bing in this case. For example, Bing listed an excellent free risk tolerance questionnaire from Rutgers University third on its search list and two or three government web sites that address the topic. Google listed the Rutgers University site as well, but also listed a couple of blog posts of dubious quality. On this topic, I give the nod to Bing for a better search.
I realize that searching for the same term at different times yields different results so your searches will probably turn up results unlike mine. My conclusion in this non-scientific study is that if you're looking for information from the web, use both Bing and Google (or any two search tools that you like). I suggest you try this out by choosing a topic that's relevant to you and run a search using both Google and Bing and compare the results. The results are likely to be different and you'll be in better control of your personal finances with information from multiple sources. Let me know if you do a personal finance search on the web this way and what you conclude. Thanks.
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