6 ms·
Is there anything that Bing does better than any other search engine? I know DuckDuckGo is supposedly private. And has bangs & cheat sheets. But what is Bing's
by nikivi 6y ago
Is there anything that Bing does better than any other search engine?
I know DuckDuckGo is supposedly private. And has bangs & cheat sheets. But what is Bing's competitive edge? Heard it's good at images.
- luckylion 6y ago> Heard it's good at images. They have a pretty picture on the front page each day. That was the argument a client gave me once why she used Bing.
- ystad 6y agoNot a bad way to start your day :)
- fakedang 6y agoIt really is a good concept. I think there is a Win10 theme too that displays a random Bing image of the Day daily for your desktop wallpaper.
- wbl 6y agoThis sounds like a terrible idea. Bing image search is not always good at ascertaining what is and isn't appealing to the prurient interest.
- fakedang 6y agoBing Image Search doesn't come into the picture I think. It's Bing Image of the Day. It's usually a generic picture like hidden waterfalls or some spot in Ireland or some cave city in Turkey. The lock screen adds a nice factoid too with each picture.
- jaywalk 6y agoI like having the image of the day on the lock screen. I'm too particular about my desktop wallpaper to allow it to be changed daily.
- grugagag 6y agoThat adds to your cognitive load. When using a search tool you should be presented with a blank screen where you enter your search keywords.
- hkmurakami 6y ago"It's not google" is probably their #1 value proposition (DDG offers the same, but MSFT has better mainstream brand awareness). This is meant without snark. It's probably the first alternative people will go to if they're wary of the level of tracking Google is capable of.
- vsareto 6y agoMS is just as capable of tracking as Google through the operating system. It's definitely branding and the only substance to it is that Google is the bad guy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- smt88 6y agoI often see this "both sides" argument and don't agree. Google has Google Analytics, YouTube, libraries, or even fonts in almost every single webpage. They have billions of email users, which means all human email users can have a profile built about them without having any relationship with Google. If that weren't enough, they have a near-monopoly on low-cost smartphone OS installs and are a massive chunk of all installs. Android is the most-used operating system. The scope of Google's reach is breathtaking and inescapable. Microsoft can only track via Windows, which is diminishingly important to consumers as Android wins the OS wars across platforms. Also, unlike Google, Microsoft doesn't rely on AdTech and tracking for its survival. Google has no businesses that can replace tracking for them.
- vsareto 6y ago>Microsoft can only track via Windows Office 365? The thing that a whole host of businesses rely upon for email, spreadsheets, presentations? MS has just as much of an opportunity as Amazon does for spying on its cloud customers through Azure too. Google is more consumer focused. MS has a good split between consumer, business, and gaming - those combined will rival Google.
- chris_f 6y agoBing's biggest advantage might be its willingness to power other search engines. DDG, Qwant, Ecosia, Swisscows and about a dozen other alternative search engines [0] are all powered by Bing. The exceptions are Runnaroo (Google), Startpage (Google), Mojeek, and Gigablast (both use their own index). [0] https://www.searchenginemap.com/ https://www.searchenginemap.com/
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- overcast 6y agoThe image search experience is definitely superior to Google. Google image search is like trying to navigate the Pinterest UI without an account.
- reallifepixel 6y agoYou get rewards points for using it and you can redeem them for stuff. That's nice.
- csydas 6y agoThat's not a feature. That's a bribe from Microsoft to use Bing. It's not sustainable and even if it's a temporary gain for now, it's the wrong incentive to use an opposing search engine. I am not suggesting only use google because google is awful, but Bing shouldnt buy users, it should actually be good to get them.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoIf that’s your approach, you shouldn’t use 9/10 VC-funded startups, whose business model is exactly the same thing.
- Brendinooo 6y agoHow long is temporary? Because I've been getting $5 Amazon cards since 2013. I'm estimating that I've received somewhere between $250 and $300 in rewards during that time.
- grugagag 6y agoUntil they kill competition, then they'll take your peanuts back.
- Brendinooo 6y ago> Until they kill competition What competition has suffered because of the existence of Bing? I think this is the first time I've been accused of killing competition by using a product with 3% market share. > they'll take your peanuts back I've already cashed out; they can't take that back. When they stop paying me to use their product, I'll probably go to Duck Duck Go.
- 6y ago
- mc32 6y agoOne thing they do much much less of is soft censorship. They don’t sanitize their suggested search phrases (as much). So if a million people Bing for ‘Rob Snob is a carpenter ant eater’ and you type Rob Snob is ... it will dutifully suggest ‘a carpenter ant eater’ unlike google which soft censors such things.
- jayshua 6y agoWhat does soft censor mean?
- codyb 6y agoI believe they don't show certain phrases in the suggested searches but don't disallow you to search and receive results for those phrases. A great example of this would be that they stopped autosuggesting the word torrent at some point in time despite returning torrent results if you searched for it explicitly. They stopped suggesting, but didn't stop indexing.
- orangepanda 6y agoIt doesnt have an annoying popup which google and even DDG insists on.
- mattlondon 6y agoWhat annoying popups are these? I am not aware of those on either?
- adonese 6y agoGoogle constantly suggests you to use chrome
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoWhilst MS just install their browser and occasionally use updates to put the icon back in your taskbar. They're both shit.
- mattlondon 6y agoMust be you :-) Never seen either - I use Firefox as my primary browser and 95% DDG, 5% Google for search.
- ffpip 6y agoHave you not used Bing recently? I've getting 3 ads for edge.
- xnyan 6y agoBing video search will consider sources other than youtube. Also the lack of (or at least, much less) censorship than google.
- thom 6y agoRight now, not really. But they already own GitHub, could easily acquire Stack Overflow, and probably then make a play at being the best developer focused search engine. Even then though, still probably no.
- simonkafan 6y agoOne good thing is, you can officially use it as an API¹. I used it to automatically search for training images for an algorithm. ¹ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/bing-web-search-api/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
- mark_l_watson 6y ago+1 for their low cost search APIs Years ago, I used Google’s search API (written by Nelson Minor). When they canceled the service, I started using Bing search APIs, and never looked back.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoIt's much better than Google when searching for porn.
- skocznymroczny 6y agoThis, the video previews are very nice, and I found it to show more results than google usually.
- Austin_Conlon 6y agoSports scores are better, for example for tennis it’ll visualize the tournament draw.
- Brendinooo 6y agoI get paid something like $30-35/year in gift cards to use it. I'm not sure I have another reason.
- bfieidhbrjr 6y agoThis. For long tail searches I go to Google but the free bing money means I use it for most things.
- x87678r 6y agoRewards are good, I get about $10/mo. I also like Bing because it brings competition on Google. The results are good for nearly everything I search for.
- warbucks 6y agoHonestly, porn search with Bing is pretty great. It doesn't care where the results come from, so its a great aggregator of multiple porn sites.
- grugagag 6y agoThe name Bing! sounds itself very porny. Sometimes I'm thinking that that they did a survey on the likability of the brand name unknowingly on a large pool of porn viewers and it naturally came up with Bing. Well, probably not but at least it is used for previewing porn
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]