5 ms·
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
by 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 agoI'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 agoWhat'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...
- jrockway 15y agoGoogle values SO scrapers higher than SO. Wasn't this fixed years ago? I haven't seen SO scrapers in ages, and I get a lot of SO results from both my personal and work Google accounts. (I definitely blocked them from my personal account ages ago, but I've never blocked anything from my work account.)
- marshray 15y agoI actually don't mind the extra 500 ms or the 1 in 10 times I have to fall back to another engine. Every time it just reminds me and I'm thinking like "guess who's not logging my keystrokes and clicks this time mwahahaa." :-)
- worldimperator 15y agoExactly my experience. I wonder why DDG doesnt integrate with Bings image search (and more natively) ?