Bing VS Google Bandwidth Comparison

Cody Taylor — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:43:02 +0000

With the unveiling of Microsofts new search engine Bing I was curious to see which site uses more bandwidth per load and query. These results are taken from the firefox plugin firebug’s Net feature. This plugin will tell you what files were downloaded and how big they were along with how long they took. It’s a great way to see how fast your site is going to be.

Google Main Page 20 KB
Search for Cody Taylor 38 KB
Search for asdf asdf 10 KB

The search for Cody Taylor was so large because of images displayed at the top of the pages.

Bing Main Page 109 KB
Search for Cody Taylor 22 KB

Over 5 times the data of Google. The search for Cody Taylor on Bing didn’t show any pictures but was still twice the size of a normal Google seearch. If we take into account the New Ajax onMouseOver event on Bing for each search result it becomes 27 KB still without any images. Remember those articles that went off about how much energy every google query uses? Looks like Bing more than triples that amount.

Of course both these sites are much more effecient when we take into account that after the first visit most of the large data is already cached in our browser. For this test I was clearing all my cache between each transaction.

Bing does have quite a few redeeming features and for a first impression it looks like it may be a serious contender but it still lacks the simplicity and speed of google.

tech stuff » bing

Bing VS Google Bandwidth Comparison