4 ms·
On my first day of giving Bing a go (I used it for about two weeks to try to fairly assess) I ran into a problem: It can spellcheck words, but it cant get it ri
by simonsarris 16y ago
On my first day of giving Bing a go (I used it for about two weeks to try to fairly assess) I ran into a problem: It can spellcheck words, but it cant get it right contextually.
Let me give you an example:
http://www.google.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer http://www.google.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer
http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+I+won+the+waer
I meant to type "how I won the war" and only Google picks up on this.
"waer" alone into google instant will bring up water (country), but with the context of my search phrase it gives me something far more accurate.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ianbishop 16y agoSounds like Bing uses just spell checking rather than n-grams on search queries as Google does.
- kenjackson 16y agoThat's a pretty big whole for Bing to miss. Probably doesn't track as well since it requires a mistyped query -- most people doing comparisons of relevance compare correctly typed queries. But a big hole for real world usage... at least I'd think so.
- Qz 16y agoI can't tell if that whole is intentional.
- brianpan 16y agoYou're query is irrelevant.
- jrockway 16y agoI agree. The first thing I would do, if writing a search engine, would be to do Google-style phrase corrections. (Although lately, I find it too aggressive. When googling obscure error messages, it usually "do you mean"-s it into a less obscure error message that I already understand. Sigh.)
- InclinedPlane 16y agoIndeed. I think google might be falling into the trap of believing that the better search is the one with more results when in many, most?, cases the exact opposite is the case.
- chc 16y agoI really think Google is getting to be too clever for its own good. When I try to search for some Mac API, it will give me a blog post about an iPhone app, no matter how much I beg and plead. Bing returns precisely what I wanted for those "Where the heck did Google get that SERP from?" kind of queries.
- wozer 16y agoInteresting. If you use Bing from Germany (with German UI), it works correctly, i.e. suggests "How I won the war". Which makes sense, as "water" is not a German word...
- imurray 16y agoI tried a bunch of search engines the other day when I couldn't find something specific. Bing was the least useful: it generalized "dice" to "die" and then gave me lots of hits about death. It should have been fairly obvious that the articles returned had nothing to do with dice.