4 ms·

And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. Perhaps search is the utility lines/distribution and ads are the gen

And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. Perhaps search is the utility lines/distribution and ads are the generation capacity, in a future disintermediation. It's hard to have a nuanced discussion about antitrust in the search market when this case is coming up 2 weeks before the election, and is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment.

milquetoastaf 6y ago
Bing has excellent video search
- kilroy123 6y ago
  The image search isn't too bad either.
  - edm0nd 6y ago
    IIRC Google Images copied Bing Images in their UX and visual style.
x87678r 6y ago
> And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. This was certainly true 10 years ago, now I can't really tell the difference.
- agrd00 6y ago
  I use DDG by default but will use Google. Honestly, I use search engines very little anymore. SEO games make them almost useless to me. Certain well curated Reddit feeds, and sources where it looks like people give a toss is my preference. IRC, Slack, Discord communities are real time with a person, and probably “better” for discovery. Let’s throw thousands of years of social evolution in the bin cause some billionaires can afford a lot of computers and exorbitant wages to have unscrupulous randos monopolize our exposure to the world. Ok Same with FB, Twitter; I’m not finding a need to connect to everyone over their cat pic firehose, and the noise. Edit: email works great for connecting to academics all over. Networking isn’t just through LinkedIn (which I also don’t use), and Upwork, or www at all. It’s just one of numerous conventions.
- MrZander 6y ago
  For general queries, I agree. But for any technical query, I find Google to be 10x better. I used bing for about 6 months, but considering most of my searches are technical, I found myself switching to Google > 40% of the time and just gave up.
krtkush 6y ago
I use DDG and more often than not it is satisfactory. About 80% of my searches are via DDG and for the rest I have to use !g[1]. I usually end up adding "reddit" to my search terms to avoid crap results on both Google and DDG. [1]I was very curious about my DDG vs !g searches and ended up making an extension for FF which measures just that - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
freeone3000 6y ago
Search and IR have incredibly strong network retrieval effects. Bing is great at "common knowledge" queries, in some cases better than Google. Bing is absolutely AWFUL at technical IR queries. Part of this is due to different index curation strategies, sure, but most of this is due to the learned behavior from the user base. With the current SOTA approaches, search network with more users fitting a profile is better able to return results for users that also fit that profile, so the most popular is the best nearly tautologically.
jaywalk 6y ago
I use Bing almost exclusively, and find it to be very good. Maybe a few times a year I go to Google to try and find something that Bing isn't finding, and it's very rare that Google turns anything up either.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
> is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment. That's crazy. If Google has that power and will to wield it, they could wield it to remove that party from power, so the pressure is zero.

milquetoastaf 6y ago

Bing has excellent video search

kilroy123 6y ago
The image search isn't too bad either.
- edm0nd 6y ago
  IIRC Google Images copied Bing Images in their UX and visual style.

x87678r 6y ago

> And nobody else comes close to having a competitive search product. I've used DDG and Bing. This was certainly true 10 years ago, now I can't really tell the difference.

agrd00 6y ago
I use DDG by default but will use Google. Honestly, I use search engines very little anymore. SEO games make them almost useless to me. Certain well curated Reddit feeds, and sources where it looks like people give a toss is my preference. IRC, Slack, Discord communities are real time with a person, and probably “better” for discovery. Let’s throw thousands of years of social evolution in the bin cause some billionaires can afford a lot of computers and exorbitant wages to have unscrupulous randos monopolize our exposure to the world. Ok Same with FB, Twitter; I’m not finding a need to connect to everyone over their cat pic firehose, and the noise. Edit: email works great for connecting to academics all over. Networking isn’t just through LinkedIn (which I also don’t use), and Upwork, or www at all. It’s just one of numerous conventions.
MrZander 6y ago
For general queries, I agree. But for any technical query, I find Google to be 10x better. I used bing for about 6 months, but considering most of my searches are technical, I found myself switching to Google > 40% of the time and just gave up.

krtkush 6y ago

I use DDG and more often than not it is satisfactory. About 80% of my searches are via DDG and for the rest I have to use !g[1]. I usually end up adding "reddit" to my search terms to avoid crap results on both Google and DDG. [1]I was very curious about my DDG vs !g searches and ended up making an extension for FF which measures just that - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/

freeone3000 6y ago

Search and IR have incredibly strong network retrieval effects. Bing is great at "common knowledge" queries, in some cases better than Google. Bing is absolutely AWFUL at technical IR queries. Part of this is due to different index curation strategies, sure, but most of this is due to the learned behavior from the user base. With the current SOTA approaches, search network with more users fitting a profile is better able to return results for users that also fit that profile, so the most popular is the best nearly tautologically.

jaywalk 6y ago

I use Bing almost exclusively, and find it to be very good. Maybe a few times a year I go to Google to try and find something that Bing isn't finding, and it's very rare that Google turns anything up either.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

> is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment. That's crazy. If Google has that power and will to wield it, they could wield it to remove that party from power, so the pressure is zero.