6 ms·

Lol, good luck shoring up Bing. I'm sorry but Bing has no real value proposition vs. Google or even Yandex. :/

sremani 11y ago
I disagree, I use Bing on regular basis (also their rewards which I use to donate to local school helps). The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards. Its the habit of Googling rather than Objective result set, that is impediment to Bing adoption. Now that Cortana is on Windows 10, lets see.
- fweespee_ch 11y ago
  > The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards. What is the value proposition that differentiates them from Google?
  - sremani 11y ago
    Its a strange question, as a consumer, I enjoy choice of Search Engines and hopefully there will be more than two. I may be minority, but my Bing search results feel much much closer to what I am looking for than Google. It could be my own bias or the simple fact that there is too much SEO gaming targeted to Google compared to Bing.
    - fweespee_ch 11y ago
      Fair enough but honestly, I pretty much find this true: * Google * DuckDuckGo [ Although with the Ad changes, if I don't have an Ad Blocker enabled, this tends to beat Google. As such, it tends to my default since I use JS blocking. ] * Yandex / Bing
      - curiousDog 11y ago
        I think DuckDuckGo gets it's results largely from Bing.
        fweespee_ch 11y ago
        I predominantly see the Yandex symbol and Yandex is cheaper than Bing so I'm not sure that is true.
        AdamSC1 11y ago
        There are actually a number of factors that go into which you might trigger the most, our primary source is Yahoo! but we also pull from Bing and Yandex in certain regions, as well as information from 400 other sources including Wikipedia, and our own crawler. You can read more about the sources here: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources We try and provide the best results for a query in a region/language regardless of the price. The only caveat is that we will only pull from sources that allow us to continue our privacy commitment to users.
  - Analemma_ 11y ago
    The rewards are one. Granted, they're not huge (I also use Bing and find it amounts to about 1 $5 Amazon gift card per month), but if you find the result quality indistinguishable, it's enough. Also, like sremani, I want to drive innovation in the area of search, and while lots of people pay lip service to wanting more competition, putting your money where your mouth is by not using Google is the only real way to do that.
    - chris11 11y ago
      True, I really do like the rewards. But I really think Bing would get rid of them if it would was a good financial decision. And I think it would be a decent decision if Bing was doing better.
      - Analemma_ 11y ago
        I'm sure that Microsoft has a great deal of data telling them that the Rewards program has a positive ROI, especially because a lot of the rewards are sweepstakes which essentially cost them nothing. Also, I have watched other people use Bing and seen four-digit numbers in their rewards count on the top-right. (It's agonizing, like watching someone who doesn't know about tab-completion use the command line.) This tells me that the number of people who use the Rewards is quite small and this contributes to its usefulness.
    - fweespee_ch 11y ago
      Fair enough, I can see people being motivated by $60/year if they find the results comparable.
- gbog 11y ago
  I have the opposite experience. When searching in Bing I almost always feel "no way that what I'm looking is there somewhere", even for something as simple as a programming language query.
- stordoff 11y ago
  I've had the exact opposite experience. Admittedly it's not a completely fair fight (Google has years of data to tailor results to me, and I know on some level what sort of queries work from experience), but it's common that if I use Bing (it is the default on my Windows Phone) the thing I'm looking for won't be on the first page of results. Using the exact same query on Google almost always has it in the top 3 results. It's not useless by any stretch, but when (very roughly speaking) a quarter of my searches end up with me going to Google anyway, there isn't much value in trying Bing first.
achow 11y ago
Bing is pretty good for the casual searchers. Bing's design is also much more mature than that of Google's (for ex', my wife loves Bing images and looks forward to seeing what's new on each day).
deleted 11y ago
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gcb0 11y ago
remember when you searched for a technical term on Yahoo in the early days, found nothing, then searched on Google and it finally understood what you meant by "c++"? the same now happens. i search Google, get lots of high profile sites. then search Bing and finally got that one forum thread that helps me with some obscure programming issue that haven't showed up on stack overflow yet.
- home_boi 11y ago
  I end up doing site:stackoverflow.com or site:quora.com for most of my searches
- dannylandau 11y ago
  I recently tried a search on Bing after failing to find what I wanted on Google, and it worked! Was really pleasantly surprised. Will be trying out Bing more often going forward.
TheLogothete 11y ago
Bing and Bing-powered search has like 30% share in the US. Siri is powered by Bing.
- achow 11y ago
  15.67% https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&gws_rd=ssl,cr&fg=1#q=bing+search+market+share https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    I often wonder why people are more interested in replying than in reading.
  - GeechieCloud 11y ago
    Guessing TheLogothete is using MS touted number which is 'search powered by bing', includes Yahoo (~23% WW and US only >30%) https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&gws_rd=ssl,cr&fg=1#q=bing%2Byahoo+search+market+share https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&...
    - accountatwork 11y ago
      Yahoo uses Bing because Microsoft was willing to cut Yahoo a better deal than Google, which happened because Microsoft was more desperate than Google. That's not exactly a good thing and it's not really a meaningful number. It would be different if Yahoo users used Yahoo because Yahoo uses Bing, but that's not the case. For example, Bing gets used in some searches because they cut Yahoo a good deal, and Yahoo pays Firefox to be the default search provider. That has nothing to do with Bing's search quality.
      - jluk 11y ago
notatoad 11y ago
IIRC Yahoo search is already a frontend for Bing. Acquiring Yahoo wouldn't change that.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
You would be surprised. Aside from the push it is getting from Windows 10, according to Microsoft filings Bing is now profitable. That is pretty huge, and while Google has had eroding CPC numbers, Microsoft's have been improving. It was just a matter of time before that would pay off for Microsoft. Given the nature of the search market (there is only one other company in this case) what that means is that all of that profit came at the expense of Google. It gives additional insight into how focused Google has become on fiscal discipline. [1] "Microsoft announced that Bing had finally achieved profitability. Search contributed more than $1 billion to Microsoft’s first quarter for fiscal 2016, said Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood during the company’s October 22 earnings call." -- http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/
- gbog 11y ago
  That's wrong on two points: - Microsoft is still the bad boy it has always been, it still owns unfairly 95% of pcs worldwide. There is no reason to be forgiving with this behemoth. - Bing being profitable or not is completely irrelevant to us end users. What is important is that Bing results are poor to very poor compared to Google's. I know it well because I'm often forced to use it. I wouldn't touch Windows 10 with a pole, but hearing it's poor users are forced to Bing shows clearly enough that Microsoft didn't learn the lesson and is still considering their user as a flock of sheep.
  - FlyingLawnmower 11y ago
    Personally, I don't find bing results "very poor". It does the job for well over 90% of my searches, and on the remaining 10%, Google doesn't do a much better job very often. I like the UI, I like the rewards system, and the video/image search is actually better than Google for me. Just throwing out an alternative datapoint.
    - riffraff 11y ago
      AFAIR in blind tests people found bing results on par with Google. Empirically, I think for the English web it works OK, but for non-english it sucks compared to google.
dredmorbius 11y ago
DDG proxies Bing for most of its searches. I've been relying on it for several years now. Results for recent (past 5 years) Web material are excellent. Some older archival materials not quite so much. That's exclusive of other DDG features which I like but aren't Bing related.

I disagree, I use Bing on regular basis (also their rewards which I use to donate to local school helps). The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards. Its the habit of Googling rather than Objective result set, that is impediment to Bing adoption. Now that Cortana is on Windows 10, lets see.

fweespee_ch 11y ago
> The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards. What is the value proposition that differentiates them from Google?
- sremani 11y ago
  Its a strange question, as a consumer, I enjoy choice of Search Engines and hopefully there will be more than two. I may be minority, but my Bing search results feel much much closer to what I am looking for than Google. It could be my own bias or the simple fact that there is too much SEO gaming targeted to Google compared to Bing.
  - fweespee_ch 11y ago
    Fair enough but honestly, I pretty much find this true: * Google * DuckDuckGo [ Although with the Ad changes, if I don't have an Ad Blocker enabled, this tends to beat Google. As such, it tends to my default since I use JS blocking. ] * Yandex / Bing
    - curiousDog 11y ago
      I think DuckDuckGo gets it's results largely from Bing.
      - fweespee_ch 11y ago
        I predominantly see the Yandex symbol and Yandex is cheaper than Bing so I'm not sure that is true.
        AdamSC1 11y ago
        There are actually a number of factors that go into which you might trigger the most, our primary source is Yahoo! but we also pull from Bing and Yandex in certain regions, as well as information from 400 other sources including Wikipedia, and our own crawler. You can read more about the sources here: https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources We try and provide the best results for a query in a region/language regardless of the price. The only caveat is that we will only pull from sources that allow us to continue our privacy commitment to users.
- Analemma_ 11y ago
  The rewards are one. Granted, they're not huge (I also use Bing and find it amounts to about 1 $5 Amazon gift card per month), but if you find the result quality indistinguishable, it's enough. Also, like sremani, I want to drive innovation in the area of search, and while lots of people pay lip service to wanting more competition, putting your money where your mouth is by not using Google is the only real way to do that.
  - chris11 11y ago
    True, I really do like the rewards. But I really think Bing would get rid of them if it would was a good financial decision. And I think it would be a decent decision if Bing was doing better.
    - Analemma_ 11y ago
      I'm sure that Microsoft has a great deal of data telling them that the Rewards program has a positive ROI, especially because a lot of the rewards are sweepstakes which essentially cost them nothing. Also, I have watched other people use Bing and seen four-digit numbers in their rewards count on the top-right. (It's agonizing, like watching someone who doesn't know about tab-completion use the command line.) This tells me that the number of people who use the Rewards is quite small and this contributes to its usefulness.
  - fweespee_ch 11y ago
    Fair enough, I can see people being motivated by $60/year if they find the results comparable.
gbog 11y ago
I have the opposite experience. When searching in Bing I almost always feel "no way that what I'm looking is there somewhere", even for something as simple as a programming language query.
stordoff 11y ago
I've had the exact opposite experience. Admittedly it's not a completely fair fight (Google has years of data to tailor results to me, and I know on some level what sort of queries work from experience), but it's common that if I use Bing (it is the default on my Windows Phone) the thing I'm looking for won't be on the first page of results. Using the exact same query on Google almost always has it in the top 3 results. It's not useless by any stretch, but when (very roughly speaking) a quarter of my searches end up with me going to Google anyway, there isn't much value in trying Bing first.

achow 11y ago

Bing is pretty good for the casual searchers. Bing's design is also much more mature than that of Google's (for ex', my wife loves Bing images and looks forward to seeing what's new on each day).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gcb0 11y ago

remember when you searched for a technical term on Yahoo in the early days, found nothing, then searched on Google and it finally understood what you meant by "c++"? the same now happens. i search Google, get lots of high profile sites. then search Bing and finally got that one forum thread that helps me with some obscure programming issue that haven't showed up on stack overflow yet.

home_boi 11y ago
I end up doing site:stackoverflow.com or site:quora.com for most of my searches
dannylandau 11y ago
I recently tried a search on Bing after failing to find what I wanted on Google, and it worked! Was really pleasantly surprised. Will be trying out Bing more often going forward.

TheLogothete 11y ago

Bing and Bing-powered search has like 30% share in the US. Siri is powered by Bing.

achow 11y ago
15.67% https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&gws_rd=ssl,cr&fg=1#q=bing+search+market+share https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  I often wonder why people are more interested in replying than in reading.
- GeechieCloud 11y ago
  Guessing TheLogothete is using MS touted number which is 'search powered by bing', includes Yahoo (~23% WW and US only >30%) https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&gws_rd=ssl,cr&fg=1#q=bing%2Byahoo+search+market+share https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=PGz5VqD0GJGAoAPIrLjABA&...
  - accountatwork 11y ago
    Yahoo uses Bing because Microsoft was willing to cut Yahoo a better deal than Google, which happened because Microsoft was more desperate than Google. That's not exactly a good thing and it's not really a meaningful number. It would be different if Yahoo users used Yahoo because Yahoo uses Bing, but that's not the case. For example, Bing gets used in some searches because they cut Yahoo a good deal, and Yahoo pays Firefox to be the default search provider. That has nothing to do with Bing's search quality.
    - jluk 11y ago

notatoad 11y ago

IIRC Yahoo search is already a frontend for Bing. Acquiring Yahoo wouldn't change that.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

You would be surprised. Aside from the push it is getting from Windows 10, according to Microsoft filings Bing is now profitable. That is pretty huge, and while Google has had eroding CPC numbers, Microsoft's have been improving. It was just a matter of time before that would pay off for Microsoft. Given the nature of the search market (there is only one other company in this case) what that means is that all of that profit came at the expense of Google. It gives additional insight into how focused Google has become on fiscal discipline. [1] "Microsoft announced that Bing had finally achieved profitability. Search contributed more than $1 billion to Microsoft’s first quarter for fiscal 2016, said Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood during the company’s October 22 earnings call." -- http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/

gbog 11y ago
That's wrong on two points: - Microsoft is still the bad boy it has always been, it still owns unfairly 95% of pcs worldwide. There is no reason to be forgiving with this behemoth. - Bing being profitable or not is completely irrelevant to us end users. What is important is that Bing results are poor to very poor compared to Google's. I know it well because I'm often forced to use it. I wouldn't touch Windows 10 with a pole, but hearing it's poor users are forced to Bing shows clearly enough that Microsoft didn't learn the lesson and is still considering their user as a flock of sheep.
- FlyingLawnmower 11y ago
  Personally, I don't find bing results "very poor". It does the job for well over 90% of my searches, and on the remaining 10%, Google doesn't do a much better job very often. I like the UI, I like the rewards system, and the video/image search is actually better than Google for me. Just throwing out an alternative datapoint.
  - riffraff 11y ago
    AFAIR in blind tests people found bing results on par with Google. Empirically, I think for the English web it works OK, but for non-english it sucks compared to google.

dredmorbius 11y ago

DDG proxies Bing for most of its searches. I've been relying on it for several years now. Results for recent (past 5 years) Web material are excellent. Some older archival materials not quite so much. That's exclusive of other DDG features which I like but aren't Bing related.