4 ms·

Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google – and Apple could fix it

32 points by fariszr 3y ago

lloydatkinson 3y ago
I can't imagine Apple ever buying and operating an enourmous .NET application. What would they be buying then, the brand? I don't see why Apple would be interested in this at all
- refulgentis 3y ago
  he meant they could accept Bing's generous offer that is > Google's, and give them the data they need to improve at scale
  - jppittma 3y ago
    People would be furious lmao. That's how you know that Google is actually the better product. If Apple came out with iOS 16, and the default search engine changed to bing, the whole internet (even this site) would collectively lose their minds.
meepmorp 3y ago
I'm not convinced bing really is worse than google search, at this point.
- kritr 3y ago
  Having switched to both Bing and DuckDuckGo as defaults and then developing the subtle habit of searching via Google.com rather than my browser’s search bar, I think I’d have to disagree. For whatever new niche of programming concepts I’m looking into, google generally outperforms Bing at finding relevant pages.
  - fatfingerd 3y ago
    I tended to get this impression with DDG because I use !g or !b only when I am dissatisfied with a ddg result, but !g seems worse than !b despite the expected overlap between ddg and Bing. Of course if you get adequately niche then Google should find something and not have spam, but I think they turned results off for anything sophisticated enough to return few results.
  - andsens 3y ago
    Get your employer to pay for Kagi. It has honestly saved me several days in search time over the last 1,5 years. The most prominent feature for me is that it only shows 0 or maybe 2 search results when there really isn’t more to find. It’s freeing, honestly. I used to verify it with a Google search like you, only to be confirmed every time. I haven’t been doing that for a while now :-)
    - mdhen 3y ago
      Yeah i just switched to kagi a couple weeks ago and ita great, much less seo stuff and very useful results at the top. The only thing i'll still use google for is shopping searches, since kagi doesnt have that explicit functionality.
thelastgallon 3y ago
Bing is the default on the most dominant computing platform with 1.5 billion devices. At zero cost to Microsoft.
- aNoob7000 3y ago
  To be fair, Google search is the default on Chrome and Chrome is king of the web browsers right now. Additionally, Google search is the default on IOS and I'm going out on a limb that the same applies for the majority of Android devices. Google did a magnificent job of making their search engine the default on the most popular devices and software at moment in time.
_23sd 3y ago
Satya's testimony focuses on defaults, but in a really unrealistic way: >“Defaults are the only thing that matter,” he said, “in terms of changing user behavior.” He called the idea that it’s easy to switch “bogus.” Maybe it's bogus on Windows, which doesn't respect search engine or browser choice, but it's one step to change the search engine on Apple's platforms which is what he's talking about here. >Not only are the economics of the Google deal hugely favorable for Apple, he said, but Apple may also be afraid of what Google would do if it lost default status. Google has a number of hugely popular services, like Gmail and YouTube — what if Google used those apps to relentlessly promote downloading Chrome, thus teaching people to circumvent the Safari browser entirely? Google already does this: click a link on any of their apps on iOS and it pulls up a menu asking to install Chrome or the Google app, your actual default browser being the last option. If Apple is afraid of Safari losing dominance to Chrome on iOS there's no way they'd allow this. >The very fact that Bing has market share of any kind on Windows — which is somewhere in the teens, Nadella said, as opposed to “low, low single digits” on mobile — is proof that defaults do work. Again this is not really a default like the default search engine on iOS, it's a situation where you have to wage an ongoing war on the OS as it constantly changes or ignores your preference. How much desktop market share would Bing have if Windows 10+ didn't open Edge and Bing for every unintentional start menu web search? >When Mehta asked him to respond to the idea that users can easily switch search engines, he said that “my only argument against that is that users don’t switch.” His best example: Apple Maps, which started out disastrously bad but has still gained market share in the last decade because it’s preinstalled on every iPhone. Speaking of the OS ignoring your preference, Apple Maps on iOS is another example of this. It's not like a default search engine that can be changed, it's the operating system maliciously tricking people who clearly want another service into using the one the OS maker wants. >For Nadella, becoming Apple’s default search engine wouldn’t be about the money, at least not directly. “We needed to be less greedy and more competitive,” he explained. A sudden increase in distribution, he said, would give Bing an increase in what Nadella called “query flow,” which essentially just means more people would do more searches. More incoming searches means more data the Bing team can use to improve the search engine and more reasons for advertisers to come to the platform. An improved search engine gets used more, which means more data, and round and round it goes. This is the virtuous cycle of search engines, and Nadella believes Bing could use that cycle to quickly catch up to Google’s quality. If the only way to make a search engine good enough to be #1 is to already be #1, as Satya seems to be implying, then it makes no sense to be in the search engine business.
olliej 3y ago
I've used Spotlight search on accident enough times to know that this is false :D
dang 3y ago
Related ongoing thread: Microsoft CEO testifies that Google’s power in search is ubiquitous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743931 - Oct 2023 (11 comments)

32 points by fariszr 3y ago

I can't imagine Apple ever buying and operating an enourmous .NET application. What would they be buying then, the brand? I don't see why Apple would be interested in this at all

refulgentis 3y ago
he meant they could accept Bing's generous offer that is > Google's, and give them the data they need to improve at scale
- jppittma 3y ago
  People would be furious lmao. That's how you know that Google is actually the better product. If Apple came out with iOS 16, and the default search engine changed to bing, the whole internet (even this site) would collectively lose their minds.

meepmorp 3y ago

I'm not convinced bing really is worse than google search, at this point.

kritr 3y ago
Having switched to both Bing and DuckDuckGo as defaults and then developing the subtle habit of searching via Google.com rather than my browser’s search bar, I think I’d have to disagree. For whatever new niche of programming concepts I’m looking into, google generally outperforms Bing at finding relevant pages.
- fatfingerd 3y ago
  I tended to get this impression with DDG because I use !g or !b only when I am dissatisfied with a ddg result, but !g seems worse than !b despite the expected overlap between ddg and Bing. Of course if you get adequately niche then Google should find something and not have spam, but I think they turned results off for anything sophisticated enough to return few results.
- andsens 3y ago
  Get your employer to pay for Kagi. It has honestly saved me several days in search time over the last 1,5 years. The most prominent feature for me is that it only shows 0 or maybe 2 search results when there really isn’t more to find. It’s freeing, honestly. I used to verify it with a Google search like you, only to be confirmed every time. I haven’t been doing that for a while now :-)
  - mdhen 3y ago
    Yeah i just switched to kagi a couple weeks ago and ita great, much less seo stuff and very useful results at the top. The only thing i'll still use google for is shopping searches, since kagi doesnt have that explicit functionality.

thelastgallon 3y ago

Bing is the default on the most dominant computing platform with 1.5 billion devices. At zero cost to Microsoft.

aNoob7000 3y ago
To be fair, Google search is the default on Chrome and Chrome is king of the web browsers right now. Additionally, Google search is the default on IOS and I'm going out on a limb that the same applies for the majority of Android devices. Google did a magnificent job of making their search engine the default on the most popular devices and software at moment in time.

_23sd 3y ago

Satya's testimony focuses on defaults, but in a really unrealistic way: >“Defaults are the only thing that matter,” he said, “in terms of changing user behavior.” He called the idea that it’s easy to switch “bogus.” Maybe it's bogus on Windows, which doesn't respect search engine or browser choice, but it's one step to change the search engine on Apple's platforms which is what he's talking about here. >Not only are the economics of the Google deal hugely favorable for Apple, he said, but Apple may also be afraid of what Google would do if it lost default status. Google has a number of hugely popular services, like Gmail and YouTube — what if Google used those apps to relentlessly promote downloading Chrome, thus teaching people to circumvent the Safari browser entirely? Google already does this: click a link on any of their apps on iOS and it pulls up a menu asking to install Chrome or the Google app, your actual default browser being the last option. If Apple is afraid of Safari losing dominance to Chrome on iOS there's no way they'd allow this. >The very fact that Bing has market share of any kind on Windows — which is somewhere in the teens, Nadella said, as opposed to “low, low single digits” on mobile — is proof that defaults do work. Again this is not really a default like the default search engine on iOS, it's a situation where you have to wage an ongoing war on the OS as it constantly changes or ignores your preference. How much desktop market share would Bing have if Windows 10+ didn't open Edge and Bing for every unintentional start menu web search? >When Mehta asked him to respond to the idea that users can easily switch search engines, he said that “my only argument against that is that users don’t switch.” His best example: Apple Maps, which started out disastrously bad but has still gained market share in the last decade because it’s preinstalled on every iPhone. Speaking of the OS ignoring your preference, Apple Maps on iOS is another example of this. It's not like a default search engine that can be changed, it's the operating system maliciously tricking people who clearly want another service into using the one the OS maker wants. >For Nadella, becoming Apple’s default search engine wouldn’t be about the money, at least not directly. “We needed to be less greedy and more competitive,” he explained. A sudden increase in distribution, he said, would give Bing an increase in what Nadella called “query flow,” which essentially just means more people would do more searches. More incoming searches means more data the Bing team can use to improve the search engine and more reasons for advertisers to come to the platform. An improved search engine gets used more, which means more data, and round and round it goes. This is the virtuous cycle of search engines, and Nadella believes Bing could use that cycle to quickly catch up to Google’s quality. If the only way to make a search engine good enough to be #1 is to already be #1, as Satya seems to be implying, then it makes no sense to be in the search engine business.

olliej 3y ago

I've used Spotlight search on accident enough times to know that this is false :D

dang 3y ago

Related ongoing thread: Microsoft CEO testifies that Google’s power in search is ubiquitous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743931 - Oct 2023 (11 comments)