Search and IR have incredibly strong network retrieval effects. Bing is great at "common knowledge" queries, in some cases better than Google. Bing is absolutel

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.