While the verdict of the DOJ trial against tech giant Google is out, an old internal document from Google is making some striking claims.
The document was discovered during the trial phase and goes back to the year 2017. This is where Google admits that fellow archrival in search, Microsoft Bing was faster. It was related to responding to mobile queries where it surpassed Google’s speed, contrary to what many might believe.
The news was first revealed by Juan Gonzalez who shared pictures/screenshots and published them on X of the document. Bing served faster responses for searches than Google.
As per Juan González, “Google regularly measures its SERP latency and compares it to Bing’s. Google has had projects in the past to improve its latency, such as “Project Folly”.”
This was followed up by the document breaking down the matter into 10 different components.
Bing results arose 300ms quicker and didn’t include differences linked to SSL. Next, Google had a bigger latency penalty in terms of logins when compared to those logged out. The difference was 350ms faster for those logged out.
Interestingly, it also claimed that Bing’s faster speed had to do with enhanced server latency that improved with time. Also, Bing benefits from greater granular streaming and hence delivers more granular chunks for SRP deliveries.
Other than that, smaller payloads for Bing were another fact worth mentioning while both tech giants had similar rendering times in terms of clients.
As a default setting, Bing doesn’t use SSL and shows little to no support for HTTP/2 and QUIC. This results in greater response times for high latency networks thanks to TLS negotiation on every question.
In the end, the document highlights how Bing gets impacted greatly by poor network conditions while Google tends to be more stable. Traffic on Google also goes through more latency on servers than that seen on desktop traffic.
