A Google document that came out of the DOJ trails said that back in 2017, Bing Search was faster than Google was specifically looking at mobile queries. The document was an internal Google document and went through 10 elements of latency.
I spotted this via Juan González Villa who posted a screenshot of this on X, the document is dated June 2017 and seems to come from Google. It says, “Looking specifically at mobile queries on browsers, Bing consistently serves search results faster than Google today:”
Then it breaks it down by 10 different areas:
1. Bing results arrive ~300ms faster: Not including differences due to SSL, Bing search results start to arrive and render ~300ms faster than Google search results.
2. Google has a larger latency penalty for logging-in than Bing: Results for logged-in user queries on Google arrive ~350ms later than queries by logged-out users. Logged-in queries on Bing are only ~100ms slower.
3. Bing is faster in part due to our server-side latency increasing since 03 2016: Latency trends show that, while user connections are gradually improving, server-side latency is getting worse at a faster rate. Roughly ~150ms of the gain comes from *Confidential* and ~80 ms from *Confidential* itself.
4. Bing has more granular streaming: The Google SRP comes down in four distinct chunks (header, body, footer, late footer). Bing delivers their SRP in many more granular chunks.
5. Bing has a smaller payload size: On average, the Bing / search page is half the size of Google a google /search page (~200kb vs ~ 100kb uncompressed, excluding external resources).
6. Bing and Google’s client-side rendering times are comparable: While there may be room for optimization, the client-side rendering times for both Bing and Google are roughly the same.
7. Bing does not use SSL by default: Using SSL incurs an amortized ~26ms loss per query relative to Bing without SSL.
8. Bing does not support HTTP/2 and QUIC: This may cause a higher response time on high-latency networks for Bing due to the TLS negotiation process on every query.
9. Bing is more adversely affected by poor networks: Under poor network conditions, Google is actually faster than Bing.
10. Google’s mobile traffic incurs more server-side latency than desktop traffic: The latency is spread evenly between *Confidential* and differs by ~50ms.
Here is the document scan:
I bet you both Google and Bing’s search results pages are slower now than they were in 2017 for some of those AI generated pages. Maybe not…
Forum discussion at X.