Which search engine is infested with the most bugs? That would be Bing, according to a software firm that rated Google, Yahoo and Google's new Caffeine update head and shoulders above Microsoft's new search engine.
The findings come from Southborough, Mass.-based uTest's 2009 third- quarter Bug Battle Report, which solicited the opinions of more than 1,100 testers from more than 50 countries. Altogether more than 600 bugs were found in testing the search engines.
Testers detected a total of 321 bugs in Bing, more than half of the bugs in the entire competition. Of those reported bugs, more than 60 percent were classified as either high severity or showstoppers. In addition, 46 percent of these bugs were classified as functional defects and 29 percent were labeled as technical and 26 percent were GUI.
To be fair, as a new entry into the search engine market, Bing's bug situation is not a surprise. And despite the bugs, Bing scored extremely high in usability and design, leaving the folks at uTest to believe that Microsoft is on to something.
"Even though Google says there's no competition, my experience indicates there is definitely one now," one tester told uTest.
Another tester gave Bing kudos for its graphic capabilities.
"Bing surprised me with its warm, intuitive interface, especially its feature-filled image and video search," one tester said. "Using the tooltips on mouse over, I can hover over the search results, and within the search results themselves, I can play the videos and zoom in on images. This is very efficient for users who are searching for images and videos."
On the flip side, Google took first place in every category users tested, with users reporting roughly 130 bugs, less than 25 percent of the total bugs in all the tested search engines.
"If factors such as accuracy, page load speed, realtime relevance and usability are important to you as they were for many in our testing community, then Google continues to lead the pack," uTest said in the report.
