5 ms·

Microsoft says : "Bing is now as good as Google"

32 points by aritraghosh007 15y ago

helpbygrace 15y ago
But not as famous as Google.
cargo8 15y ago
'freshness' may be as good as Google, but unfortunately 'relevance' is still way, way worse...
vyrotek 15y ago
Hmm. I think I'll give it a try and replace my default search for a week or so and see how the results are. I imagine I go to Google more out of habit than quality. We shall see.
scarmig 15y ago
I find it just as good, actually. There's always the point, though, that you can't be "just as good as" an entrenched player to win. You've got to change the entire nature of the playing field. So long as MS doesn't do that, it's "lost" (for certain definitions of lost that include making hundreds of millions of dollars).
- viscanti 15y ago
  That assumes that the entrenched leader doesn't make mistakes. If the market leader does something outrageous, like violate privacy (or even if they're perceived as doing that), a "just as good as" alternative that doesn't do that, could "win".
- marshray 15y ago
  The article was about how the companies (and people) behind it go about developing search engine technology. It barely mentions market share. There's probably interesting things to say about it if we can avoid the rut of the old familiar "which of /Google|Microsoft|Apple|Facebook/ will winner-take-all in the market battle with for /Search|Advertising|Desktop|Mobile|Social/" discussion.
Shank 15y ago
I'd argue differently. At least according to CloudFlare, Google Bot crawls my site (http://tshock.co/ http://tshock.co/) literally ten times more frequently than the second place leader, and that's Baidu. To each their own.
galuggus 15y ago
I've been using bing quite a lot recently as google is sporadically blocked in China. Coincidentally I was remarking to myself this morning how incredibly poor the results are compared to google Time for duckduckgo
- rhplus 15y ago
  The Chinese version is apparently in beta. Try with the version set to USA: http://www.bing.com/?setmkt=en-us http://www.bing.com/?setmkt=en-us
  - galuggus 15y ago
    thanks
enraged_camel 15y ago
The moment you publicly compare yourself to the dominant player in your field, you have lost.
- batiudrami 15y ago
  No, I don't think so. I think the moment the dominant player starts comparing itself to you, like the way Office ran ads comparing itself to Google Docs they have a problem. If you're not the dominant player, you want to make sure you can back your claims up though, because if customers try it once and they find the claim to be wrong, they'll never try it again.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  Well, Apple ran those annoying Mac vs PC ads. And while the ads themselves may or may not have worked well, Apple has not lost in the personal computer field. (Well, depending on how you define "lost" I guess. But I think they haven't lost by most definitions.)
  - FaceKicker 15y ago
    Considering they've stopped running those ads since gaining a ton of traction in the PC industry over the past few years, I think those ads are probably supporting evidence of GP's claim (if anything), not a counter-example. Edit: I went back and actually reread what GP said and realized I was wrong if interpreted literally, but I took it to mean something more like "you know you're currently losing when you compare yourself to the competition". But yeah, my bad, you're definitely right under the literal interpretation - Apple didn't lose and may actually win at the end.
donrhummy 15y ago
I've tried it numerous times, usually every time I read another report about it being as accurate as Google. I have never found that to be the case. I tried it again today and as usual, the results were much less than helpful (particularly when searching for computer problem solutions).
shingen 15y ago
"The company's Caffeine index spans 100 million gigabytes of data ... " That's a painful number. I wonder what Facebook's image data store is up to these days.
falling 15y ago
It’s pretty good, but I wish it was as pretty on the desktop as it is on mobile.
Urgo 15y ago
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but just based on submitting sitemaps to google and bing I'm going to have to disagree with this statement. Google has successfully indexed over 1.2 million pages that I've told it about. Bing fails every time trying to read the sitemap files (says they are empty?? the same ones google uses...) and has only indexed about 3,000 pages. I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say this statement is false. They can't even index pages you tell it about. (If you're curious my site is http://socialblade.com/youtube http://socialblade.com/youtube and the 1.2 million plus pages indexed are statistics on youtube channels)
- rhplus 15y ago
  1.2 million plus pages indexed Oh, please. This site is a content farm. You've even have placeholder images saying "ADVERTISE HERE". Why should Bing - or Google - index this? What value does a search result to your site give to a user who most likely is searching for actual videos?
  - Urgo 15y ago
    A content farm exists to take existing content and farm it out for people to find with no additional value. That's not at all what my site is. My site allows any youtube user to track their statistics and compare themselves with any other user on the site. Every user in the database (over 215k right now) gets updated at least once a day by querying youtube's api and ranks are updated, etc. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who use the site daily to track said data. Very different then a content farm that just tricks people serving up recycled videos. :)
johnfn 15y ago
I don't believe that it is. I feel like search queries can be divided broadly into two categories: general and specific. General queries are things like "what is python" or "java tutorial". These are subjects that are well known and have a lot of relevant information on the web. Specific queries are queries things that you and maybe a few hundred people in the world have ever encountered. Think: really esoteric programming erors. What I believe - and I don't have any hard facts to back it up past my own experience, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt - is that Bing excels in the first category but not the second. The other day I was doing some schoolwork involving SSL, where I had to write a man in the middle proxy. I ran into this really bizarre error message: "valid not before not set." I had no idea what it meant, and since I was using a proxy SSL server for the assignment I ended up using bing to search for it - no results. Google has exactly 1 result for that phrase, but it's the one that you need to get back on track. This happened often throughout the project. Bing gives pretty good results; I certainly don't wish to disparage the website. But whenever I started running into really esoteric or weird bugs, Google turned up the right page time and time again. Bing felt like it was taking a hazy guess at the right answer. These are the specific queries, and this is where Google stays ahead. I've used Bing in the past for a month or two; I've also used duckduckgo. Both are very good. I certainly don't consider myself anything of a google fanboy, for that matter. But when it comes to specific queries, I still can't find a search engine that holds a candle to Google.
- bstar77 15y ago
  I've been trying duckduckgo for a month now and I'm definitely not getting as good results for my "esoteric programming errors" as I hoped I would. I'm also shocked at how much I used google image search, losing that has been a shock. Now I switched away from Google due to privacy issues so Bing does nothing to improve that. I have a little more faith in Duckduckgo, but it is definitely lagging on features and relevance for me so I don't know how long it's going to be my default search.
  - joedevon 15y ago
    What's great w/ DDG is if you want a google image search, you append !gi bing images !bi and !g for redirecting to Google !b for bing. !m for google maps. So basically you give a small guy a chance and it's decent enough. When it isn't the shortcut is great for the big boys. And for programming, Duck Duck Go is the best because you append !so and it takes you to stackoverflow. Google values SO scrapers higher than SO. That said, if you don't learn the shortcuts, you are missing out. Also, after listening to a talk by Stoyan Stefanov (it's on IT Conversations) I realized that what makes Google so useful subconsciously is their subsecond response time. This is my biggest problem w/ ddg. That said, I went to a meetup tonight by an Xoogler. He was mentioning that they have an internal query tool that will query a trillion records in a second. I wonder if Bing has the same...
philip1209 15y ago
AHAHAHAHHAHA AHAHAHHAHAHHAAHHA AHAHAHAHAHH breath AHAHHAHHAAHAH AHAHAHAHAH
pan69 15y ago
Well, I'm glad that Microsoft tells us that.
edwardy20 15y ago
Everyone who says Bing is better or Google is better should try a blind test. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/
- murali89 15y ago
  Nice. Definitely, an easy way to compare. But the yahoo column seems to be not working.
- diego 15y ago
  That test only compares the result links. It's missing a significant chunk of the experience: autocomplete, instant results, highlighting, social results, best-guess results, calculator functions, etc. It would have been a decent blind test maybe ten years ago.
- boyter 15y ago
  I find I tend to always select Bing based on that search. Perhaps the way I write search queries melds better with Bing. Generally though I use more specialized search engines for my day to day work and with things like DDG and !bang syntax I can get to where I need more quickly.
cyanbane 15y ago
I find the Bing photo of the day much more interesting than the Google Doodle. Its something so simple, but the results are so comparable at this point (commoditized?) that the photo vs doodle stands out for me. I do however still use Google for 2 kinds of searches: the exact odd page search (ie I know I have seen on blog x a story about SignalR etc) and "define:" queries to get definitions. Other than that though Bing or a direct wikipedia search suffices pretty damn well in almost all other cases.
jebblue 15y ago
Bing? What's that? As good as? Seriously? That's the goal now? I'm not a Google fan but guess who I'm not a fan of.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  "I'm not a Google fan but guess who I'm not a fan of." Uhm.. Google? Easiest. Quiz. Ever.
  - jebblue 15y ago
    hehe ah ok good catch. Well no I meant Microsoft, what I was saying was that I'm not a huge fan of Google but I am somewhat of a fan.
fpgeek 15y ago
In other news, Pepsi says "Pepsi is now as good as Coke". </sarcasm> First, why should you believe them? Second, even if they're right, why does it matter? "As good as" isn't a good enough reason to switch for most people.
murali89 15y ago
I doubt the claims about being 'as good as', in this article, but It is a very well written and informative article about the internals of search engines.
drhowarddrfine 15y ago
Microsoft says a lot of things that aren't true.
moultano 15y ago
The claim in the title is not made in the article.
ramblerman 15y ago
"is now at leas on par with google" I think this is the problem, by playing catchup, innovation has taken a back seat. Being on par with google is a subpar goal for a competitor. It's somewhat similar to google plus trying to catch up to facebook.
drucken 15y ago
My first acid test for search engines, other than a baseline performance speed, for 15 years has been simple: search for myself. Whoever finds either the most up-to-date or most results about me in the first page of results, gets my (reluctant) vote as my default search engine. This is not because of any particular vain reason but my name is esoteric enough to be almost unique and with time, despite my careful attempts, I have ended up leaving a significant Internet trail. Fortunately, only one search engine always finds details about me: Google. Bing shows ZERO results about me, after even 10 default pages! However, I would still use Google over other search engines for one reason alone: date-ranged searching. This is very useful for many reasons.
grailholder 15y ago
The problem with Bing is not that it is not as good as Google, but rather that it IS NOT Google. People who are used to Google's design and have a bag of trick that they associate with it will not switch over to Bing even if statistical evidence finds it's results to be more relevant for all searches. Google will stay good enough for most of it's users for years to come.

helpbygrace 15y ago

But not as famous as Google.

cargo8 15y ago

'freshness' may be as good as Google, but unfortunately 'relevance' is still way, way worse...

vyrotek 15y ago

Hmm. I think I'll give it a try and replace my default search for a week or so and see how the results are. I imagine I go to Google more out of habit than quality. We shall see.

scarmig 15y ago

I find it just as good, actually. There's always the point, though, that you can't be "just as good as" an entrenched player to win. You've got to change the entire nature of the playing field. So long as MS doesn't do that, it's "lost" (for certain definitions of lost that include making hundreds of millions of dollars).

viscanti 15y ago
That assumes that the entrenched leader doesn't make mistakes. If the market leader does something outrageous, like violate privacy (or even if they're perceived as doing that), a "just as good as" alternative that doesn't do that, could "win".
marshray 15y ago
The article was about how the companies (and people) behind it go about developing search engine technology. It barely mentions market share. There's probably interesting things to say about it if we can avoid the rut of the old familiar "which of /Google|Microsoft|Apple|Facebook/ will winner-take-all in the market battle with for /Search|Advertising|Desktop|Mobile|Social/" discussion.

Shank 15y ago

I'd argue differently. At least according to CloudFlare, Google Bot crawls my site (http://tshock.co/ http://tshock.co/) literally ten times more frequently than the second place leader, and that's Baidu. To each their own.

galuggus 15y ago

I've been using bing quite a lot recently as google is sporadically blocked in China. Coincidentally I was remarking to myself this morning how incredibly poor the results are compared to google Time for duckduckgo

rhplus 15y ago
The Chinese version is apparently in beta. Try with the version set to USA: http://www.bing.com/?setmkt=en-us http://www.bing.com/?setmkt=en-us
- galuggus 15y ago
  thanks

enraged_camel 15y ago

The moment you publicly compare yourself to the dominant player in your field, you have lost.

batiudrami 15y ago
No, I don't think so. I think the moment the dominant player starts comparing itself to you, like the way Office ran ads comparing itself to Google Docs they have a problem. If you're not the dominant player, you want to make sure you can back your claims up though, because if customers try it once and they find the claim to be wrong, they'll never try it again.
tikhonj 15y ago
Well, Apple ran those annoying Mac vs PC ads. And while the ads themselves may or may not have worked well, Apple has not lost in the personal computer field. (Well, depending on how you define "lost" I guess. But I think they haven't lost by most definitions.)
- FaceKicker 15y ago
  Considering they've stopped running those ads since gaining a ton of traction in the PC industry over the past few years, I think those ads are probably supporting evidence of GP's claim (if anything), not a counter-example. Edit: I went back and actually reread what GP said and realized I was wrong if interpreted literally, but I took it to mean something more like "you know you're currently losing when you compare yourself to the competition". But yeah, my bad, you're definitely right under the literal interpretation - Apple didn't lose and may actually win at the end.

donrhummy 15y ago

I've tried it numerous times, usually every time I read another report about it being as accurate as Google. I have never found that to be the case. I tried it again today and as usual, the results were much less than helpful (particularly when searching for computer problem solutions).

shingen 15y ago

"The company's Caffeine index spans 100 million gigabytes of data ... " That's a painful number. I wonder what Facebook's image data store is up to these days.

falling 15y ago

It’s pretty good, but I wish it was as pretty on the desktop as it is on mobile.

Urgo 15y ago

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but just based on submitting sitemaps to google and bing I'm going to have to disagree with this statement. Google has successfully indexed over 1.2 million pages that I've told it about. Bing fails every time trying to read the sitemap files (says they are empty?? the same ones google uses...) and has only indexed about 3,000 pages. I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say this statement is false. They can't even index pages you tell it about. (If you're curious my site is http://socialblade.com/youtube http://socialblade.com/youtube and the 1.2 million plus pages indexed are statistics on youtube channels)

rhplus 15y ago
1.2 million plus pages indexed Oh, please. This site is a content farm. You've even have placeholder images saying "ADVERTISE HERE". Why should Bing - or Google - index this? What value does a search result to your site give to a user who most likely is searching for actual videos?
- Urgo 15y ago
  A content farm exists to take existing content and farm it out for people to find with no additional value. That's not at all what my site is. My site allows any youtube user to track their statistics and compare themselves with any other user on the site. Every user in the database (over 215k right now) gets updated at least once a day by querying youtube's api and ranks are updated, etc. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who use the site daily to track said data. Very different then a content farm that just tricks people serving up recycled videos. :)

johnfn 15y ago

I don't believe that it is. I feel like search queries can be divided broadly into two categories: general and specific. General queries are things like "what is python" or "java tutorial". These are subjects that are well known and have a lot of relevant information on the web. Specific queries are queries things that you and maybe a few hundred people in the world have ever encountered. Think: really esoteric programming erors. What I believe - and I don't have any hard facts to back it up past my own experience, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt - is that Bing excels in the first category but not the second. The other day I was doing some schoolwork involving SSL, where I had to write a man in the middle proxy. I ran into this really bizarre error message: "valid not before not set." I had no idea what it meant, and since I was using a proxy SSL server for the assignment I ended up using bing to search for it - no results. Google has exactly 1 result for that phrase, but it's the one that you need to get back on track. This happened often throughout the project. Bing gives pretty good results; I certainly don't wish to disparage the website. But whenever I started running into really esoteric or weird bugs, Google turned up the right page time and time again. Bing felt like it was taking a hazy guess at the right answer. These are the specific queries, and this is where Google stays ahead. I've used Bing in the past for a month or two; I've also used duckduckgo. Both are very good. I certainly don't consider myself anything of a google fanboy, for that matter. But when it comes to specific queries, I still can't find a search engine that holds a candle to Google.

bstar77 15y ago
I've been trying duckduckgo for a month now and I'm definitely not getting as good results for my "esoteric programming errors" as I hoped I would. I'm also shocked at how much I used google image search, losing that has been a shock. Now I switched away from Google due to privacy issues so Bing does nothing to improve that. I have a little more faith in Duckduckgo, but it is definitely lagging on features and relevance for me so I don't know how long it's going to be my default search.
- joedevon 15y ago
  What's great w/ DDG is if you want a google image search, you append !gi bing images !bi and !g for redirecting to Google !b for bing. !m for google maps. So basically you give a small guy a chance and it's decent enough. When it isn't the shortcut is great for the big boys. And for programming, Duck Duck Go is the best because you append !so and it takes you to stackoverflow. Google values SO scrapers higher than SO. That said, if you don't learn the shortcuts, you are missing out. Also, after listening to a talk by Stoyan Stefanov (it's on IT Conversations) I realized that what makes Google so useful subconsciously is their subsecond response time. This is my biggest problem w/ ddg. That said, I went to a meetup tonight by an Xoogler. He was mentioning that they have an internal query tool that will query a trillion records in a second. I wonder if Bing has the same...

philip1209 15y ago

AHAHAHAHHAHA AHAHAHHAHAHHAAHHA AHAHAHAHAHH breath AHAHHAHHAAHAH AHAHAHAHAH

pan69 15y ago

Well, I'm glad that Microsoft tells us that.

edwardy20 15y ago

Everyone who says Bing is better or Google is better should try a blind test. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

murali89 15y ago
Nice. Definitely, an easy way to compare. But the yahoo column seems to be not working.
diego 15y ago
That test only compares the result links. It's missing a significant chunk of the experience: autocomplete, instant results, highlighting, social results, best-guess results, calculator functions, etc. It would have been a decent blind test maybe ten years ago.
boyter 15y ago
I find I tend to always select Bing based on that search. Perhaps the way I write search queries melds better with Bing. Generally though I use more specialized search engines for my day to day work and with things like DDG and !bang syntax I can get to where I need more quickly.

cyanbane 15y ago

I find the Bing photo of the day much more interesting than the Google Doodle. Its something so simple, but the results are so comparable at this point (commoditized?) that the photo vs doodle stands out for me. I do however still use Google for 2 kinds of searches: the exact odd page search (ie I know I have seen on blog x a story about SignalR etc) and "define:" queries to get definitions. Other than that though Bing or a direct wikipedia search suffices pretty damn well in almost all other cases.

jebblue 15y ago

Bing? What's that? As good as? Seriously? That's the goal now? I'm not a Google fan but guess who I'm not a fan of.

georgemcbay 15y ago
"I'm not a Google fan but guess who I'm not a fan of." Uhm.. Google? Easiest. Quiz. Ever.
- jebblue 15y ago
  hehe ah ok good catch. Well no I meant Microsoft, what I was saying was that I'm not a huge fan of Google but I am somewhat of a fan.

fpgeek 15y ago

In other news, Pepsi says "Pepsi is now as good as Coke". </sarcasm> First, why should you believe them? Second, even if they're right, why does it matter? "As good as" isn't a good enough reason to switch for most people.

murali89 15y ago

I doubt the claims about being 'as good as', in this article, but It is a very well written and informative article about the internals of search engines.

drhowarddrfine 15y ago

Microsoft says a lot of things that aren't true.

moultano 15y ago

The claim in the title is not made in the article.

ramblerman 15y ago

"is now at leas on par with google" I think this is the problem, by playing catchup, innovation has taken a back seat. Being on par with google is a subpar goal for a competitor. It's somewhat similar to google plus trying to catch up to facebook.

drucken 15y ago

My first acid test for search engines, other than a baseline performance speed, for 15 years has been simple: search for myself. Whoever finds either the most up-to-date or most results about me in the first page of results, gets my (reluctant) vote as my default search engine. This is not because of any particular vain reason but my name is esoteric enough to be almost unique and with time, despite my careful attempts, I have ended up leaving a significant Internet trail. Fortunately, only one search engine always finds details about me: Google. Bing shows ZERO results about me, after even 10 default pages! However, I would still use Google over other search engines for one reason alone: date-ranged searching. This is very useful for many reasons.

grailholder 15y ago

The problem with Bing is not that it is not as good as Google, but rather that it IS NOT Google. People who are used to Google's design and have a bag of trick that they associate with it will not switch over to Bing even if statistical evidence finds it's results to be more relevant for all searches. Google will stay good enough for most of it's users for years to come.