8 ms·

> Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's director of Bing, believes that if Bing can change the way people think about search, sooner or later users will switch over from Go

by 0x12 15y ago

> Stefan Weitz, Microsoft's director of Bing, believes that if Bing can change the way people think about search, sooner or later users will switch over from Google. For that to work people would have to change the way they think about microsoft as well, not how they think about search. Right now there are several ecosystems on the web that you can be part of. There is the 'social' ecosystem which governs you interactions with other people rather than with other services. Facebook, twitter, google+ etc. Then there is 'mobile', which is a gateway to a bunch of data and to information. Then there is your work and the applications you use to do that work. Finally there is search. Search is different from all the others in that you could switch overnight to a new provider, but just like any other good infrastructure component, you probably will not do that if you are satisfied with your current provider. Search is not visible enough to warrant a conscious decision until you are dissatisfied. Changing your thinking on search is one hurdle that is going to be hard to cross without say google going down for a couple of weeks or some major mishap that would make their search results unusable for any period of time. That would give an upstart a better chance at a first shot at retaining the users. Changing the way you think about microsoft is going to be a very hard obstacle to clear as well. Microsoft is synonymous with software that you use on your desktop and with several botched attempts at doing search. Before you try them again you'd have to see google performing worse than the best that microsoft has ever presented in this field. Frankly I'm surprised that they keep sinking money into this, they've clearly failed to establish a profitable beach head, meanwhile google is making money hand over fist in the exact same domain. I'm happy they do, more competition is better but for now google seems to be acing them. Microsoft will have to be very careful that 'search' does not turn in to their Afghanistan.

arethuza 15y ago
"For that to work people would have to change the way they think about microsoft as well" I honestly don't really care that Bing is part of Microsoft - if they consistently started finding noticeably "better" search results than Google I'd stop using Google in exactly the same way that I stopped using AltaVista/HotBot/etc. YMMV.
- vegai 15y ago
  Then again, Google was new with no baggage of previous wrongdoings. Many people remember how Microsoft operated in the past (and I suppose, in the present).
  - arethuza 15y ago
    There were loads of search engines around when Google started - as far as I recall people started using them because their search results were dramatically better than what you'd get from other sites. Simple as that.
    - 0x12 15y ago
      Being dramatically better than google is a high hurdle. It's tough for competitors but google pretty much did an end-run around the search problem and to be just like google is not good enough a reason to switch. Now if someone would do to google what google did to altavista that would move the needle on many fronts. I suspect DDG is not it, but I'm not saying it is not possible.
      - timr 15y ago
        "Being dramatically better than google is a high hurdle." Everyone likes to say that...but really, how do you know? By definition, disruption comes when you don't expect it. When Google came along, people didn't know that search could be made better. Likewise, today, people don't see what they're not getting with Google...they just know that Google's results cause about the same level of satisfaction as they always have. The search engine that gets a toehold against Google is going to do something completely different, and re-define the search game for all of the players. It's not going to be a head-to-head competition on the same playing field.
      - beagle3 15y ago
        The change will not come from being better than Google at their own game (unless they start being incompetent), but rather from winning a different game that Google didn't pay attention to in time. That's how Facebook happened. In the mobile search space, pay attention to DoAT.com - it's mobile search done right, unlike google (or anyone else). If they gain enough traction, they can dethrone google eventually. Or it could just be a passing fad. It's rare to win an established game, like Google did with search (or Microsoft did 20 years ago with word processing and spreadsheets). It's much more common to win at a new game that is being overlooked by the giants. (Some people say the Microsoft takeover of the office space is "a different game" because no one took "office suites" seriously except them; However, Word really was better than WordPerfect and friends at the time; and Excel really was better than 1-2-3, and people were switching one-package-at-a-time. So I think this should be considered winning an established game)
dabeeeenster 15y ago
I bet if you asked 100 people in the street who owned bing, less than 10 would say Microsoft.
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  You're being generous. At least 98 of them would say, "What's Bing?". Almost certainly more.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    Bing has had pretty heavy marketing. I'm guessing 10% would have at least heard of it in a major city.
- galactus 15y ago
  And probably none of them would find that to be bad in itself.
- suivix 15y ago
  That's because the other 90+ would have no clue what you're talking about.
pessimizer 15y ago
>Frankly I'm surprised that they keep sinking money into this, they've clearly failed to establish a profitable beach head, meanwhile google is making money hand over fist in the exact same domain. This seems to be Microsoft's MO, and it seems to have worked with the XBox. Push hard, buy a second place position with massive marketing, investment, and underpricing, and continue to maintain it while losing billions and billions. Then the first place company inevitably, eventually makes a series of horrible, very public missteps, and Microsoft is positioned as "The Alternative." On one hand, I think it's a pretty sleazy tactic, but on the other hand I rarely ever see any corporation thinking in the long term, especially to this absurd degree. I'm not exactly sure what the strategy is to defend against this, either.
- w1ntermute 15y ago
  I don't think you can compare the two situations, because Sony has gone to great lengths to demonstrate that it's a supremely incompetent company (which it is). Google has done nothing of the sort. Plus, people constantly expect innovation from the console makers, but for Google to hold on to its position in search, it just has to stay online.
  - markokocic 15y ago
    While Google reputation has been superb so far, at least for normal users, their push for Google+ may change that. It's kind of "all in" move by Google. If Google+ succeeds, their brand will be even stronger, and as king of data, search and social they will stay leaders for the long time, giving them possibility to attack other market segments too. But if Google+ fails, Google brand will be severely damaged, and normals could go somewhere else. All Microsoft has to do here is to wait for the outcome and actively try to sabotage Google+ efforts by working together with Facebook.
    - sausagefeet 15y ago
      I don't think G+ failing really damages Google's brand that much. It will just be another service people don't use on Google while they are searching.
billybob 15y ago
"Microsoft is synonymous with software that you use on your desktop" This is insightful. While some of us geeks have a grudge against Microsoft, most people don't. They probably do, however, have a mental separation between the desktop and the web. Microsoft was slow to embrace the web because it threatens their core products. So the web grew without them. Now they're saying, "oh, we're on the web, too!" But when people think of the web, they don't think of Microsoft. They missed the chance to make that association. And it's hard to get it back.
- patio11 15y ago
  They probably do, however, have a mental separation between the desktop and the web. I think most users couldn't describe the difference between these two if their life depended on it, FWIW. Ever met someone who referred to Excel as a web site?
  - euroclydon 15y ago
    Yes, for the two CWC customers who managed to find my phone number and call me, my question, "What web browser are you using?" was met with a long pause.
    - rmc 15y ago
      They were probably using Google for their internet, but they might not have installed a browser yet.
  - libraryatnight 15y ago
    A startling number of people believe that the internet IS Internet Explorer.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  I suspect that for most general users the web still equates with the big blue "e".
webwright 15y ago
Great points. This guy ( http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?p=209 http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?p=209 ) mentions that users prefer bing results over google results when the put a google logo above them (no source cited, tho). That's got to be maddening... But yeah, it's a brand problem as much as it's a product problem.
- voodoomagicman 15y ago
  I would be interested to hear which results users prefer when there are no logos at all. I did a blind search engine test about the time that Bing launched, and oddly enough for the queries I tried, I picked Yahoo (pre bing) as having the best results most often. I still use Google though, so maybe it really is all about the logo for me...
  - moultano 15y ago
    The queries people do when testing a search engine are very different from the queries they do in real life. For starters, the first thing people do to test a search engine is to search for their own name.
  - finisterre 15y ago
    Blekko's "search engine monte" provides blinded results from their own search as well as from Google and Bing [1], so you can perform your own experiments. 1. http://blekko.com/ws/hacker+news+/monte http://blekko.com/ws/hacker+news+/monte
- thefool 15y ago
  All I know is that at school when I'm on public computers, sometimes I'll accidentally use bing without noticing, do a couple queries, get frustrated by not finding the link that I'm looking for (often a course website), notice I'm using bing, and switch over.
Lewisham 15y ago
Frankly I'm surprised that they keep sinking money into this, they've clearly failed to establish a profitable beach head, meanwhile google is making money hand over fist in the exact same domain. Well, what else are they going to do? It's very clear that in the foreseeable technological future, search will continue to be an immensely important lynchpin of all sorts of services. Microsoft are in this because they realize that. You can't walk away from this table, however much you're losing. Bing is definitely going to be bouyed by the Xbox, Windows Mobile and Windows 8 integration, so that's good. FWIW, I like Bing, and I want them to do well. The results aren't as good as Google's yet, but their ancillary properties, like image search are pretty good. Video search is certainly better than Google's half-baked offering.
credo 15y ago
>>For that to work people would have to change the way they think about microsoft as well This thread is a great example of the problems Microsoft faces among HNers, but I don't think the general public has such a blatant bias against Microsoft. For instance, this topic was submitted 9 hours ago, has 128 points and is on the front page. It also has a false title.The title asserts that "Microsoft has lost $9 billion on Bing". However, the CNN article doesn't have this title. The article says that Microsoft "has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since the search service launched in June 2009". Now, HN moderators often heavy-handedly change submission titles on the grounds that the title violates some obscure HN rule (like for example, the rule that "X ways to optimize your app" is inappropriate) In this case, we have a much more blatant rule violation - changing the original title of the story and substituting it with a false assertion. Yet, none of the moderators have changed the title of this story.
- cshenoy 15y ago
  If you kept reading the paragraph you quote, it also says "since Microsoft began breaking out that unit's finances in 2007, the company has lost a total of $9 billion." While the title of this post is not stating a clear timeline for the loss, it still is technically correct. And the original comment you're referring to isn't stating a clear bias against Microsoft, per se. It's more that they're stating a general perception: that Microsoft is Windows and that it's mostly a desktop software provider. I think we can all agree that the general public agrees with that. Don't worry - not all of us are out to get Microsoft.
  - credo 15y ago
    Wrong again. The online services division has lost $9B since 2007. "online services division" is not the same as "Bing". It is a division which (over the years) has included several different products/services. Bing (created in 2009) is one of those services. MSN used to be (and may still be) part of that division.
- epo 15y ago
  Agreed, the $9Bn refers to declared losses by the online services division. However you come across as claiming that Microsoft is being victimised by a conspiracy of unreasoning and unreasonable hatred by HNers and the mods. "Blatant bias"? Really? I would suggest that people (not just HNers) know exactly what Microsoft is like and how badly they have behaved, if people are biased against Microsoft it is for a good reason. Microsoft have earned their reputation.
TheCondor 15y ago
I think it's more than that. Are they after some holy question in 'search?' Or are they really after the ad money? To me, it seems like if they think Google has just not delivered or dropped the ball or something regarding search, then Bing really fails to deliver. I have a hard time calling it better than Google and a really really hard time seeing it being better enough to switch. It just doesn't do that much more. If they're doing search, then the clearly need to do it better right? Not simply as good. Is it just arroagance that they can deliver some that merely matches or approaches Google and expect to eventually win? What makes them think that? It doesn't appear to be supported by any facts.
- chakde 15y ago
  Personally I don't think there's any doubt that Google's search quality has fallen down over the last few years. There have been a few instances where what I was looking for was not found on Google and I gave up looking for it. Later (after a few months!) when by chance I tried the same query on Bing, the results showed up right on the first page. Surprised by this, I rechecked it on Google and it appears either on the 3rd or 4th page - something I would never check earlier. Since then I started always doing a backup search on Bing for anything important, to see results I might have missed on Google. By now, I'm using them 50:50. Also attended a lecture on Bing search, and learnt that their approach is a little different, which could acount for this observation.

by 0x12 15y ago

arethuza 15y ago

"For that to work people would have to change the way they think about microsoft as well" I honestly don't really care that Bing is part of Microsoft - if they consistently started finding noticeably "better" search results than Google I'd stop using Google in exactly the same way that I stopped using AltaVista/HotBot/etc. YMMV.

vegai 15y ago
Then again, Google was new with no baggage of previous wrongdoings. Many people remember how Microsoft operated in the past (and I suppose, in the present).
- arethuza 15y ago
  There were loads of search engines around when Google started - as far as I recall people started using them because their search results were dramatically better than what you'd get from other sites. Simple as that.
  - 0x12 15y ago
    Being dramatically better than google is a high hurdle. It's tough for competitors but google pretty much did an end-run around the search problem and to be just like google is not good enough a reason to switch. Now if someone would do to google what google did to altavista that would move the needle on many fronts. I suspect DDG is not it, but I'm not saying it is not possible.
    - timr 15y ago
      "Being dramatically better than google is a high hurdle." Everyone likes to say that...but really, how do you know? By definition, disruption comes when you don't expect it. When Google came along, people didn't know that search could be made better. Likewise, today, people don't see what they're not getting with Google...they just know that Google's results cause about the same level of satisfaction as they always have. The search engine that gets a toehold against Google is going to do something completely different, and re-define the search game for all of the players. It's not going to be a head-to-head competition on the same playing field.
    - beagle3 15y ago
      The change will not come from being better than Google at their own game (unless they start being incompetent), but rather from winning a different game that Google didn't pay attention to in time. That's how Facebook happened. In the mobile search space, pay attention to DoAT.com - it's mobile search done right, unlike google (or anyone else). If they gain enough traction, they can dethrone google eventually. Or it could just be a passing fad. It's rare to win an established game, like Google did with search (or Microsoft did 20 years ago with word processing and spreadsheets). It's much more common to win at a new game that is being overlooked by the giants. (Some people say the Microsoft takeover of the office space is "a different game" because no one took "office suites" seriously except them; However, Word really was better than WordPerfect and friends at the time; and Excel really was better than 1-2-3, and people were switching one-package-at-a-time. So I think this should be considered winning an established game)

dabeeeenster 15y ago

I bet if you asked 100 people in the street who owned bing, less than 10 would say Microsoft.

mike-cardwell 15y ago
You're being generous. At least 98 of them would say, "What's Bing?". Almost certainly more.
- dasil003 15y ago
  Bing has had pretty heavy marketing. I'm guessing 10% would have at least heard of it in a major city.
galactus 15y ago
And probably none of them would find that to be bad in itself.
suivix 15y ago
That's because the other 90+ would have no clue what you're talking about.

pessimizer 15y ago

>Frankly I'm surprised that they keep sinking money into this, they've clearly failed to establish a profitable beach head, meanwhile google is making money hand over fist in the exact same domain. This seems to be Microsoft's MO, and it seems to have worked with the XBox. Push hard, buy a second place position with massive marketing, investment, and underpricing, and continue to maintain it while losing billions and billions. Then the first place company inevitably, eventually makes a series of horrible, very public missteps, and Microsoft is positioned as "The Alternative." On one hand, I think it's a pretty sleazy tactic, but on the other hand I rarely ever see any corporation thinking in the long term, especially to this absurd degree. I'm not exactly sure what the strategy is to defend against this, either.

w1ntermute 15y ago
I don't think you can compare the two situations, because Sony has gone to great lengths to demonstrate that it's a supremely incompetent company (which it is). Google has done nothing of the sort. Plus, people constantly expect innovation from the console makers, but for Google to hold on to its position in search, it just has to stay online.
- markokocic 15y ago
  While Google reputation has been superb so far, at least for normal users, their push for Google+ may change that. It's kind of "all in" move by Google. If Google+ succeeds, their brand will be even stronger, and as king of data, search and social they will stay leaders for the long time, giving them possibility to attack other market segments too. But if Google+ fails, Google brand will be severely damaged, and normals could go somewhere else. All Microsoft has to do here is to wait for the outcome and actively try to sabotage Google+ efforts by working together with Facebook.
  - sausagefeet 15y ago
    I don't think G+ failing really damages Google's brand that much. It will just be another service people don't use on Google while they are searching.

billybob 15y ago

"Microsoft is synonymous with software that you use on your desktop" This is insightful. While some of us geeks have a grudge against Microsoft, most people don't. They probably do, however, have a mental separation between the desktop and the web. Microsoft was slow to embrace the web because it threatens their core products. So the web grew without them. Now they're saying, "oh, we're on the web, too!" But when people think of the web, they don't think of Microsoft. They missed the chance to make that association. And it's hard to get it back.

patio11 15y ago
They probably do, however, have a mental separation between the desktop and the web. I think most users couldn't describe the difference between these two if their life depended on it, FWIW. Ever met someone who referred to Excel as a web site?
- euroclydon 15y ago
  Yes, for the two CWC customers who managed to find my phone number and call me, my question, "What web browser are you using?" was met with a long pause.
  - rmc 15y ago
    They were probably using Google for their internet, but they might not have installed a browser yet.
- libraryatnight 15y ago
  A startling number of people believe that the internet IS Internet Explorer.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
I suspect that for most general users the web still equates with the big blue "e".

webwright 15y ago

Great points. This guy ( http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?p=209 http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/?p=209 ) mentions that users prefer bing results over google results when the put a google logo above them (no source cited, tho). That's got to be maddening... But yeah, it's a brand problem as much as it's a product problem.

voodoomagicman 15y ago
I would be interested to hear which results users prefer when there are no logos at all. I did a blind search engine test about the time that Bing launched, and oddly enough for the queries I tried, I picked Yahoo (pre bing) as having the best results most often. I still use Google though, so maybe it really is all about the logo for me...
- moultano 15y ago
  The queries people do when testing a search engine are very different from the queries they do in real life. For starters, the first thing people do to test a search engine is to search for their own name.
- finisterre 15y ago
  Blekko's "search engine monte" provides blinded results from their own search as well as from Google and Bing [1], so you can perform your own experiments. 1. http://blekko.com/ws/hacker+news+/monte http://blekko.com/ws/hacker+news+/monte
thefool 15y ago
All I know is that at school when I'm on public computers, sometimes I'll accidentally use bing without noticing, do a couple queries, get frustrated by not finding the link that I'm looking for (often a course website), notice I'm using bing, and switch over.

Lewisham 15y ago

Frankly I'm surprised that they keep sinking money into this, they've clearly failed to establish a profitable beach head, meanwhile google is making money hand over fist in the exact same domain. Well, what else are they going to do? It's very clear that in the foreseeable technological future, search will continue to be an immensely important lynchpin of all sorts of services. Microsoft are in this because they realize that. You can't walk away from this table, however much you're losing. Bing is definitely going to be bouyed by the Xbox, Windows Mobile and Windows 8 integration, so that's good. FWIW, I like Bing, and I want them to do well. The results aren't as good as Google's yet, but their ancillary properties, like image search are pretty good. Video search is certainly better than Google's half-baked offering.

credo 15y ago

>>For that to work people would have to change the way they think about microsoft as well This thread is a great example of the problems Microsoft faces among HNers, but I don't think the general public has such a blatant bias against Microsoft. For instance, this topic was submitted 9 hours ago, has 128 points and is on the front page. It also has a false title.The title asserts that "Microsoft has lost $9 billion on Bing". However, the CNN article doesn't have this title. The article says that Microsoft "has lost $5.5 billion on Bing since the search service launched in June 2009". Now, HN moderators often heavy-handedly change submission titles on the grounds that the title violates some obscure HN rule (like for example, the rule that "X ways to optimize your app" is inappropriate) In this case, we have a much more blatant rule violation - changing the original title of the story and substituting it with a false assertion. Yet, none of the moderators have changed the title of this story.

cshenoy 15y ago
If you kept reading the paragraph you quote, it also says "since Microsoft began breaking out that unit's finances in 2007, the company has lost a total of $9 billion." While the title of this post is not stating a clear timeline for the loss, it still is technically correct. And the original comment you're referring to isn't stating a clear bias against Microsoft, per se. It's more that they're stating a general perception: that Microsoft is Windows and that it's mostly a desktop software provider. I think we can all agree that the general public agrees with that. Don't worry - not all of us are out to get Microsoft.
- credo 15y ago
  Wrong again. The online services division has lost $9B since 2007. "online services division" is not the same as "Bing". It is a division which (over the years) has included several different products/services. Bing (created in 2009) is one of those services. MSN used to be (and may still be) part of that division.
epo 15y ago
Agreed, the $9Bn refers to declared losses by the online services division. However you come across as claiming that Microsoft is being victimised by a conspiracy of unreasoning and unreasonable hatred by HNers and the mods. "Blatant bias"? Really? I would suggest that people (not just HNers) know exactly what Microsoft is like and how badly they have behaved, if people are biased against Microsoft it is for a good reason. Microsoft have earned their reputation.

TheCondor 15y ago

I think it's more than that. Are they after some holy question in 'search?' Or are they really after the ad money? To me, it seems like if they think Google has just not delivered or dropped the ball or something regarding search, then Bing really fails to deliver. I have a hard time calling it better than Google and a really really hard time seeing it being better enough to switch. It just doesn't do that much more. If they're doing search, then the clearly need to do it better right? Not simply as good. Is it just arroagance that they can deliver some that merely matches or approaches Google and expect to eventually win? What makes them think that? It doesn't appear to be supported by any facts.

chakde 15y ago
Personally I don't think there's any doubt that Google's search quality has fallen down over the last few years. There have been a few instances where what I was looking for was not found on Google and I gave up looking for it. Later (after a few months!) when by chance I tried the same query on Bing, the results showed up right on the first page. Surprised by this, I rechecked it on Google and it appears either on the 3rd or 4th page - something I would never check earlier. Since then I started always doing a backup search on Bing for anything important, to see results I might have missed on Google. By now, I'm using them 50:50. Also attended a lecture on Bing search, and learnt that their approach is a little different, which could acount for this observation.