7 ms·

Bing Gained Less Than 1% Market Share Since Adding Bing Chat

98 points by georgehill 3y ago

cjes 3y ago
[dead]
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
They can even add mind reading capabilities, until they aren't the default search engine on the biggest browsers and mobile platforms in the world(FF, Chrome, Android, Safari, iOS), their market share ain't growing significantly. Defaults matter most, and Windows-Edge isn't big enough to drive this.
aster0id 3y ago
That's because the underlying search engine is really bad. And the LLM is only as good as it's given context.
- kromem 3y ago
  It's really true. Bing chat is 'smarter' when it doesn't search. The model is too reliant on search results which are often wrong, but it treats them like gospel.
skepticATX 3y ago
The “Google is going downhill” narrative only exists in the tech bubble. No one actually thinks this way in the real world. Generative AI features can enhance search somewhat but aren’t a replacement. It’s not enough of a driver on its own to take market share from Google.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > The “Google is going downhill” narrative only exists in the tech bubble. No one actually thinks this way in the real world Maybe. But the opinion that Google is returning less relevant results is sooner or later going to go mainstream unless they start returning relevant results. We're users too, but we notice things first. Just because the other users haven't noticed them doesn't mean that they won't in the near future.
  - dangus 3y ago
    I personally don’t even agree that Google returns irrelevant results. I am a DuckDuckGo user and I still use the !G flag when the results I’m getting aren’t good. Every time I go over to Google the results improve slightly. ChatGPT is a game changer when it comes to getting a system to understand the underlying meaning of my query. I used to give the example of searching for Frank Lloyd Wright’s height - doing so on a search engine would give you results about the buildings themselves. You’d have to dig for the simple information of how tall the dude was. Alas, Google actually fixed this and quickly displays the man’s actual height now. Microsoft and Google are both going to integrate AI into their search engines and they’ll both improve drastically as a result. We’re only scratching the surface on the subject.
    - brookst 3y ago
      It’s not so much that Google returns irrelevant results as it is that Google returns results that are optimized for taking as long as possible to glean the information you’re looking for. Recipes are the classic example. Because Google upranks sites that people spend more time on after a click, most recipe searches yield pages that start with the history of flour milling and what milk is, before eventually getting to the desired recipe 5000 words later.
      - dangus 3y ago
        I don’t agree that Google is optimizing for time wasting, either. The faster they get you to click an ad link the faster they get paid. The phenomenon with recipes that you mention has nothing to do with Google: it has more to do with copyright. You can’t copyright a recipe, but you can copyright written commentary about cooking a recipe. The recipe blogs also need enough content to place ads around.
      - KMag 3y ago
        From my memory working on web indexing at Google roughly 15 years ago, there was a step function for detecting "short clicks" that indicated a page was irrelevant for that query. As long as the user spent above some minimum before returning to Google, increased time on the site didn't indicate higher quality. So, the real optimum is ranking for one or more popular searches (regardless of relevance), looking vaguely interesting, and just confusing enough that it takes a couple of seconds to realize this isn't the page you wanted. Either that, or being exactly what someone wants for one of the popular searches. Though, things may have changed, and my memory definitely has faded. Also, plenty of SEOs may have misunderstood short clicks as a quality signal, so even if maximizing time on site doesn't help, I wouldn't be surprised if SEOs still recommend it.
- realusername 3y ago
  Both can be true, Google is going downhill but that's not enough of a motivation to switch, defaults are very powerful.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It’s going to be a freaking cliff when it happens - the moment Tim Apple thinks that Google as a default isn’t good enough for the iPhone he’ll have it switch to some LLM powered by DuckDuckBing or something, and Google’s search traffic will plunge.
    - realusername 3y ago
      I'm not sure it's exactly how it will pan out but it's clear that those LLMs are a new existential threat for Google. They can answer a lot of questions in a lot of ways that Google just cannot.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      And then you'll watch in helpless horror as 90% of iPhone users willingly install the Gmail and YouTube apps.
- pydry 3y ago
  The decline of a monopoly is like going bankrupt. It happens slowly first. Then all at once. Their position is entrenched enough that they'd be able to exist just on brand fumes for a good number of years yet but once the rot sets in there's no coming back.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  I got this hunch that most searches are for the top domain of a site as people forget of it is .org, .com, .gov or .us or whatever. However, I don't understand how statcounter got the data about usage it the first place. Their methodology might be flawed.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  Also, average people’s tech habits don’t change overnight. Tech people will change browsers, search engines, and SaaS tools without much thought. The average person learns something and sticks with it for a very long time. Bing is playing a long game. There are a lot of examples of things people in tech bubbles think that have little relevance in the real world: That Google can’t be trusted, that everyone wants laptops with upgradable RAM and phones with swappable batteries, that desktop websites should take priority over mobile, that offline apps are preferred over cloud apps. Spend some time in product management and you realize that tech people’s demands are unique. Even the claimed demands of tech bubble people often fail to materialize into sales. Just look at all the demand for mini iPhones in tech bubbles compared to how little they actually sold.
  - tempest_ 3y ago
    This used to be the case when using a computer before the mobile walled gardens took hold. Non tech savvy people don't even realize they are using Chrome in android or Safari on an iphone. They will never change they just use the default search bar that is on their device.
- josefx 3y ago
  Didn't it come up during the epic lawsuit that google going downhill is irrelevant since most users will use the default no matter how bad it is?
- boringg 3y ago
  I used DDG as my standard but I find that I still need to go to google for all the conveniences that they have built into their search functionality. I have to give them credit they have figured out somethings to keep you binded to their search.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aquova 3y ago
  While I don't think it's enough to drive people to a different product, the fact that Google search is noticeably worse than in prior years has definitely gained mainstream attention. The amount of ads and SEO junk has caused frustration, but the alternatives aren't well known for most people to bother to switch. An artist I follow on Youtube put out this (comical) video regarding it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
- helboi4 3y ago
  Honestly my fairly tech illiterate mother is constantly complaining about how google is full of ads and irrelevant information. I'm not sure that people don't notice. It's just they know there's nothing better.
huijzer 3y ago
Microsoft's mission is to "empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more." Maybe not having tons of distractions in the form of advertisements on the search homepage allows people to achieve more.
- malfist 3y ago
  That might be Microsoft's mission _statement_, but their mission is to make the most profit at all costs
  - kingkongjaffa 3y ago
    so is every for-profit business...
    - taosx 3y ago
      I believe there's a sweet spot before companies grow too much where there can still be some ethics behind some business decisions, after that ethics become a byproduct influenced by marketing strategies and public sentiment weighted against market competition and many other factors, basically it transforms into an entity that tries to make as much profit as possible at all costs.
    - diffeomorphism 3y ago
      Yeah, no. That is at best a joke about you taking statements overly literally.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  Since they’ve added it, my searches in the mobile app fail about 50 percent of the time because the connection isn’t good enough. I don’t know what they’ve changed but it has some weird connectivity requirements. I only use it for the rewards and now Google is going to match it(at least I got a postcard with an online offer)
ed_elliott_asc 3y ago
I noticed chatgpt uses bing when searching now so expect the market share figure to go up
andai 3y ago
You need to use Edge to use it, right? That might be why.
- jehaj 3y ago
  Not anymore (for me at least). I am able to use it with Firefox. However I do not know if it has something to do with European regulation.
  - pteraspidomorph 3y ago
    Is that a recent development? I can use it on Firefox now as well, but the previous time I checked they were still telling me to use Edge instead.
    - kevincox 3y ago
      It was definitely locked to Edge at launch and for quite a period of time. However it has been open to other browsers for at least a few months now.
      - Tommstein 3y ago
        Too late, they blew their one shot. Ain't no one who tried it when it was new and hyped and was told that they couldn't use it since they weren't using Edge setting reminders to go back occasionally and check whether Microsoft has finally pulled their head out of their ass, it just instantly ceased to exist for them.
        andai 3y ago
        I tried it a few times but was mostly disappointed with the results. I built a superior solution (for my usage anyway) in like 50 lines of Python. Just uses duckduckgo for search, extracts text from top 8 results, shoves into gpt-3. (I think I got a massive cost reduction by filtering paragraphs with embedding API, but that's just an optimization.) Phind is better than what I built, though. I don't actually use it that much (I'm not sure why—habit? Impatience?), but every time I do I'm surprised with the accuracy. I think a big part of it is which pages to select for sources. Google Bard failed hard here in my testing, gave nonsense answers because its sources were AI generated SEO spam!
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Would like to see chart of Chrome/Edge superimposed on Google/Bing. Usage Rates. I'm using Google less and less, but not using Bing. It is more like Google is not as useful anymore. So would like to see a trend of usage rates, to see if Bing market share didn't go up much, did overall Google usage go down? Market share might have only gone up 1%, but did the overall market shrink.
- sottol 3y ago
  Market share should be relative, so if there was a stark decline in search bing would have declined close to as much as Google. Unless this is some other measure erroneously labeled as market share .
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Sure I've just seen 'market' share be used to spin things. Like hyping how your market share went UP. But you lost customers, sales were actually DOWN. Just the other guy lost more. So your market share went up. I've been in companies that had bad sales, and they super hyped how market share had gone up like we were winning. But the entire market was shrinking enough that total sales had gone down.
- jerpint 3y ago
  Google is also less and less “useful” because social media has essentially turned most of online content into content that cannot be indexed by google
  - mgiannopoulos 3y ago
    I think after a new Google/Twitter agreement a few months ago, Google started returning tweets in result messages again.
globalnode 3y ago
googles search was so much better than the competition for so long it would take a big drop in quality for people to get fed up and look elsewhere (en mass)
flykespice 3y ago
Tbh I find it annoying everytime it processes for answers when I look for results (I'm using Bing as default engine because I'm stuck on windows 11 and I want to keep it minimally bloated as possible relying only on Edge), waste of cpu resources on my browser I can lookup for answers on my own.
bazil376 3y ago
I think the path to generative AI search needs to be more subtle. Changing it wholesale to a chat interface just kind of confuses people.
magicalhippo 3y ago
I tried it a few times. Was useless. I asked stuff like "how to do X in Y" and it proceeded to give some generic answer about what X was and then something like "how to this in Y is specific to Y". Well duh. I guess it can be interesting if you're after some Wikipedia-like information, but in those cases I just go to Wikipedia or similar. Clearly I lack imagination, so, how to use this in a useful way?
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  I have Bing enabled on the family computer by default on Windows for the Family Safety features. I tried searching for "rainbow friends official" yesterday to understand what it is (yes I'm that out of touch). I got tons of what looked like knock offs and spam, with big bright video previews and no official looking site. I switched to Google and found the official site immediately and realised it's a Roblox game, so the Bing results weren't wrong at all but they sure looked wrong. There's just something about Bing that looks bad, I don't know what it is.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >I got tons of what looked like knock offs and spam, with big bright video previews and no official looking site. Same for me on most searches. Bing is far too cluttered and busy, all over the place, making your eyes constantly hunt to find what you're looking for. Microsoft, if you're reading this, simpler is almost always better, no need to make the results page look like an Arch user's terminal session.
    - Reimersholme 3y ago
      [dead]
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      This is what Microsoft will always lack: taste and style. Every once in a while they accidentally (-or not) come up with something that is decent but it doesn’t last, next version is atrocious in some way or another. - Im sure there’s talented professional behind anything that is good and the accident is their decisions surviving the corporate gauntlet of enshitification or expnanding the scope of the project such that it becomes an unpleasant mess, probably obnoxious too.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
"But but but journalists from The Verge told me it's going to take over the world" /s It's a brand issue, people doesn't associate Microsoft with great products, you see it with their gaming division as well, despite insane marketing, they fail to match Sony both in HW and services (Sony has like 3x more, both, console sales and service subscribers than MS) We need less of both, Google and Microsoft both want to be in a monopoly position, which is bad
- frou_dh 3y ago
  From what I remember of the Xbox 360 days it was seen as a great console vs. the PS3, and the Xbox Live service was seen as far superior, and was popular.
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    X360 released 1 year before the PS3, online gaming was booming, same era as WoW and the PSP, released 1 year earlier, was just as good and was the one to popularize online live services, it released with a web browser and online store! and sold as much as the X360, then the PS3 came 1 year later, after the X360 and catched up X360: 84m PS3 87m X1: 58m PS4:117m Xbox (X/S): 25m PS5: 50m (ongoing) Stats and numbers doesn't lie, people didn't stick with what Microsoft had to offer, not good enough
Closi 3y ago
Gaining 1% of market share from a baseline of 2.4% would mean growing their share of the market by 41%
- blibble 3y ago
  it is not "1%" it is "less than 1%"
  - Closi 3y ago
    Good point - so I guess it could be anything from 0% to 40%, although I guess my broader point is that the measure of absolute percentage points could hide significant ‘actual’ growth.
- brookst 3y ago
  This is the important observation. A 40% CAGR would be terrifying to Google.
  - eviks 3y ago
    it's not CAGR since there is nothing to compound
jpeg_hero 3y ago
I asked Perplexity a question. Gave me an answer I accepted, then, thought, better just double check this with a Google search. Nope Perplexity gave me a totally wrong answer. I cannot tell you how upsetting a user experience this was to me. Thinking about canceling my Pro sub off of one wrong answer. Can’t trust it.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  What was the question, out of curiosity?
  - jpeg_hero 3y ago
    it was the dumbest question ever, too! that might have made it worse. "What happens to the virus plot line in the movie Office Space?" something along those lines.
- timeon 3y ago
  > Can’t trust it. I have similar experience with ChatGPT. Sometimes I'm hesitating to use it because I feel that it is better to not get information then get information which may or may not be true.
zeroclicks 3y ago
How can you determine whether market share add was due to adding the chat?
visarga 3y ago
I mostly use phind.com nowadays. Good search and good LLM.
- aio2 3y ago
  Same, but can get wrong some times.
- midnitewarrior 3y ago
  That has also been my experience. I left ChatGPT for phind.com. I tried perplexity, but I found phind to be superior.
Woshiwuja 3y ago
The problem is that i still have to open that bloated piece of garbage website to access it
TheUnhinged 3y ago
Despite Microsoft aggressive push (via Edge)?! Surprised…
amadeuspagel 3y ago
That Microsoft only made Bing Chat available from Edge shows that they still don't understand the web. Everyone uses Chrome today, because they started using Google first, from whatever browser they were using.
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  It’s available on safari on iOS and Mac. I think it’s limited to 3 queries without signing in. I think originally it was only bing app or edge app but no longer the case.
- midnitewarrior 3y ago
  It was available there first. It was a value-add for using Edge over Chrome, and it was somewhat effective for about 3 months like that. I started using Edge to have free access to that and I enjoyed it at the time. That event caused me to take another look at Edge, and I now prefer it to Chrome and use it as my daily driver at work. I am split between Edge and Brave at home. Honestly, Microsoft has done a good job with a browser (finally). It only took them 25 years.
lm28469 3y ago
My parents don't even know about chatgpt, the current gen of ai, &c. and they're not even retired yet. It's a bubble, most peeople don't know about it and most of the people who know about it heard of it through TV/Web news with "AI will replace your job in 6 months" kind of BS. idk why bing would become super popular all of a sudden when a good 90% of the web users are tech illiterate. In most people's head internet = google = chrome (and apple = safari because it just works) Even in my tech literate circles the new flavor of AI is barely used
- siva7 3y ago
  Your parents aren't exactly a predictor of current or future markets. Most people under 30 with the financial ability to buy a subscription have heard of ChatGPT. That's the only thing that counts in market terms.
  - eagleusr 3y ago
    Agreed that origin commenter's two parents are not a great enough sample size to gauge the popularity of generative AI implementations such as ChatGPT.
    - lm28469 3y ago
      The data point is the article and reality. My comment was just part of the answer, aka real world AI usage is nowhere close to what people want to believe here. One commenter says everyone under 30 has a paid chatgpt account, yet chatgpt as a self reported user base of 185 millions, with only 100 millions unique active user per week, a far cry from every people under 30 with a spare 20$. Even if every single one of these people installed bing on all their devices it wouldn't make a dent... chrome is used by more than 3b people. I took a bet last year on this very forum about how chatgpt wouldn't become anywhere to what the HN prophets promised, I can take another bet for 2025 lmao https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/543218/worldwide-internet-users-by-browser/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/543218/worldwide-interne...
  - 3y ago
yread 3y ago
What is the percentage of Google searches actually performed by humans? Maybe if we all switched there would still be so much bot traffic the market share would barely moved? Then again I haven't started using it and I don't know anyone who has so at least in my bubble it's not surprising
makeitdouble 3y ago
Following the link to the StatCounter[0] source, it seems bing chat isn't taken into account in the first place, nor do they have an acurate view of the search activity. To add to that since it's an analytics plugin, it could also affect how those pages are ranked in Google and Bing in not so subtle ways. All in all, that feels like very little facts to come up with any opinion on the subject matter. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology > Is bing chat included in search engine share? > We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don't measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.
gumballindie 3y ago
Ai search is unrealiable and of low quality. It limits discoverability and reduces exposure to novel content and it is no use to businesses. Sadly google is also experimenting with ai and as such their results are of lower quality, but still far better than bing.
elforce002 3y ago
I used chatgpt to try to fix some issues with certbot, docker, and nodejs, I just gave up and went straight to forums, etc... I found out what I was looking for by interacting and putting together the answer out of those interactions. Of course, chatGPT is not "intelligent" to comprehend but that's how "open" AI and tech bros are selling it. I didn't even flinch when Microsoft announced it was going to implement AI in its search engine. Habits are difficult to change. I'm still using Search engines (Brave most of the time and google when I can't find what I'm looking for), tech forums, StackOverflow (Still a tech gold mine), etc... and lastly chatgpt if I have time to write a really good prompt. The bubble is still there, few are paying attention outside it, let alone using it to be "rich". Heck, Crypto Bros are now selling courses on how to monetize chatGPT, and what's worse, people are buying it! It's the same cycle over and over again. Yes, LLMs brought decades of R&D to the forefront of society and put that piece of tech on people's hands yet that doesn't mean everyone will adopt it just because. Our phones are engineering marvels yet we use them for mundane things most of the time.
gremlinsinc 3y ago
I use Bing way more than Google now, but I also love phind for more detailed coding answers. Claude is best for writing prose. I try bard sometimes too, it writes really good SEO and Etsy listings. It's still early days so finding the best solution with ai is still a WIP, since dalle3 came out I've used Bing chat way more. image creator gives you 15 images per day, Bing chat does a better job with images by reiterated prompts with adjustments and gives near unlimited uses if using the chat interface.
WelcomeShorty 3y ago
And my prediction, based on a pool of 3, is that this 1% will be gone a day later. Have you tried co-pilot? It is the worst. My 3 year old gives more coherent answers and paints better images.
deafpolygon 3y ago
I use it daily and I enjoy using it. It's been pretty helpful and I've gotten used to it, so much so that going to Google is just... not useful.
renegat0x0 3y ago
It is not surprising. Default behavior is the king. It is not that easy to change default search on phones. Most of the traffic goes from there. Mobile is the king This will eventually lead to Google downfall, as it may feel overconfident. This may result someday in a sudden shift, change at search. I do not think that search engines have any future. It will be replaced by bots period. It would be dumb for Google to invest any money in normal search. Normies will not want to google anything, or browse links, if computer will be able "to tell", or produce answer instead of links. No further search is required. Search is already dead.
faeriechangling 3y ago
Whenever I open up Bing Chat, I do so accidentally, and it makes me frustrated and want to use Google.
malshe 3y ago
If anything, Bing is pulling down ChatGPT. Whenever ChatGPT uses Bing to search for anything, I know the result is going to be crap. This is quite apparent when I ask a question related to published research findings. Bing does not compare with Google Scholar so ChatGPT is stuck with whatever garbage Bing returns. I found that Claude performs much better than ChatGPT in such cases (I pay for ChatGPT). Now whenever I see ChatGPT using Bing, I head to Claude without even waiting for ChatGPT to complete its response.
stormed 3y ago
My big issue with AI powered search is I don't really trust what it's telling me in terms of news and more specific questions. Sometimes I'll skim what the Bing/Google generation has to say if it takes me longer than 8 seconds to find a relevant link, otherwise I don't find it that enticing of a feature. In terms of Bing Chat, easily the biggest appeal to me is it's based on GPT-4 and includes features for creative/professional writing. I think that alone is the biggest reason to use it over chatGPT 3.5.
chucke1992 3y ago
But does search traffic can be counted like that? I mean when people use chat they don't use the search no?
midnitewarrior 3y ago
There were about 3 months that I thought Bing Chat was an incredible feature that was added for free. Since then, it has been eclipsed by other free generative search like phind.com which are more functional and free. I think the Bing Chat answers have gotten too concise to be useful for anything technical. It's good for quick retrieval of simple things, but I have abandoned it and ChatGPT for phind.com, at least for now. Ask me in 3 months, I may have another system I favor. This space is evolving rapidly.
kromem 3y ago
I sometimes wonder what the outcome would have been if they didn't curb 'Sydney'. In those first few weeks users reported spending hours engaged with the product and that they had some of the most interesting conversations in their life. The interest and engagement quickly died down as the 'errant' human-like behavior was tampered down.
Tommstein 3y ago
I remember going to check it out, and them refusing to let me try it unless I used Edge and/or a Bing account (don't remember exactly and don't care). And that's how they blew their one shot to get me and hordes of others to give a flying fuck about it.
i8comments 3y ago
Bing chat and chatgpt are complementary to duckduckgo, not substitutes.

98 points by georgehill 3y ago

cjes 3y ago

[dead]

They can even add mind reading capabilities, until they aren't the default search engine on the biggest browsers and mobile platforms in the world(FF, Chrome, Android, Safari, iOS), their market share ain't growing significantly. Defaults matter most, and Windows-Edge isn't big enough to drive this.

aster0id 3y ago

That's because the underlying search engine is really bad. And the LLM is only as good as it's given context.

kromem 3y ago
It's really true. Bing chat is 'smarter' when it doesn't search. The model is too reliant on search results which are often wrong, but it treats them like gospel.

skepticATX 3y ago

The “Google is going downhill” narrative only exists in the tech bubble. No one actually thinks this way in the real world. Generative AI features can enhance search somewhat but aren’t a replacement. It’s not enough of a driver on its own to take market share from Google.

lelanthran 3y ago
> The “Google is going downhill” narrative only exists in the tech bubble. No one actually thinks this way in the real world Maybe. But the opinion that Google is returning less relevant results is sooner or later going to go mainstream unless they start returning relevant results. We're users too, but we notice things first. Just because the other users haven't noticed them doesn't mean that they won't in the near future.
- dangus 3y ago
  I personally don’t even agree that Google returns irrelevant results. I am a DuckDuckGo user and I still use the !G flag when the results I’m getting aren’t good. Every time I go over to Google the results improve slightly. ChatGPT is a game changer when it comes to getting a system to understand the underlying meaning of my query. I used to give the example of searching for Frank Lloyd Wright’s height - doing so on a search engine would give you results about the buildings themselves. You’d have to dig for the simple information of how tall the dude was. Alas, Google actually fixed this and quickly displays the man’s actual height now. Microsoft and Google are both going to integrate AI into their search engines and they’ll both improve drastically as a result. We’re only scratching the surface on the subject.
  - brookst 3y ago
    It’s not so much that Google returns irrelevant results as it is that Google returns results that are optimized for taking as long as possible to glean the information you’re looking for. Recipes are the classic example. Because Google upranks sites that people spend more time on after a click, most recipe searches yield pages that start with the history of flour milling and what milk is, before eventually getting to the desired recipe 5000 words later.
    - dangus 3y ago
      I don’t agree that Google is optimizing for time wasting, either. The faster they get you to click an ad link the faster they get paid. The phenomenon with recipes that you mention has nothing to do with Google: it has more to do with copyright. You can’t copyright a recipe, but you can copyright written commentary about cooking a recipe. The recipe blogs also need enough content to place ads around.
    - KMag 3y ago
      From my memory working on web indexing at Google roughly 15 years ago, there was a step function for detecting "short clicks" that indicated a page was irrelevant for that query. As long as the user spent above some minimum before returning to Google, increased time on the site didn't indicate higher quality. So, the real optimum is ranking for one or more popular searches (regardless of relevance), looking vaguely interesting, and just confusing enough that it takes a couple of seconds to realize this isn't the page you wanted. Either that, or being exactly what someone wants for one of the popular searches. Though, things may have changed, and my memory definitely has faded. Also, plenty of SEOs may have misunderstood short clicks as a quality signal, so even if maximizing time on site doesn't help, I wouldn't be surprised if SEOs still recommend it.
realusername 3y ago
Both can be true, Google is going downhill but that's not enough of a motivation to switch, defaults are very powerful.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It’s going to be a freaking cliff when it happens - the moment Tim Apple thinks that Google as a default isn’t good enough for the iPhone he’ll have it switch to some LLM powered by DuckDuckBing or something, and Google’s search traffic will plunge.
  - realusername 3y ago
    I'm not sure it's exactly how it will pan out but it's clear that those LLMs are a new existential threat for Google. They can answer a lot of questions in a lot of ways that Google just cannot.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    And then you'll watch in helpless horror as 90% of iPhone users willingly install the Gmail and YouTube apps.
pydry 3y ago
The decline of a monopoly is like going bankrupt. It happens slowly first. Then all at once. Their position is entrenched enough that they'd be able to exist just on brand fumes for a good number of years yet but once the rot sets in there's no coming back.
rightbyte 3y ago
I got this hunch that most searches are for the top domain of a site as people forget of it is .org, .com, .gov or .us or whatever. However, I don't understand how statcounter got the data about usage it the first place. Their methodology might be flawed.
Aurornis 3y ago
Also, average people’s tech habits don’t change overnight. Tech people will change browsers, search engines, and SaaS tools without much thought. The average person learns something and sticks with it for a very long time. Bing is playing a long game. There are a lot of examples of things people in tech bubbles think that have little relevance in the real world: That Google can’t be trusted, that everyone wants laptops with upgradable RAM and phones with swappable batteries, that desktop websites should take priority over mobile, that offline apps are preferred over cloud apps. Spend some time in product management and you realize that tech people’s demands are unique. Even the claimed demands of tech bubble people often fail to materialize into sales. Just look at all the demand for mini iPhones in tech bubbles compared to how little they actually sold.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  This used to be the case when using a computer before the mobile walled gardens took hold. Non tech savvy people don't even realize they are using Chrome in android or Safari on an iphone. They will never change they just use the default search bar that is on their device.
josefx 3y ago
Didn't it come up during the epic lawsuit that google going downhill is irrelevant since most users will use the default no matter how bad it is?
boringg 3y ago
I used DDG as my standard but I find that I still need to go to google for all the conveniences that they have built into their search functionality. I have to give them credit they have figured out somethings to keep you binded to their search.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aquova 3y ago
While I don't think it's enough to drive people to a different product, the fact that Google search is noticeably worse than in prior years has definitely gained mainstream attention. The amount of ads and SEO junk has caused frustration, but the alternatives aren't well known for most people to bother to switch. An artist I follow on Youtube put out this (comical) video regarding it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
helboi4 3y ago
Honestly my fairly tech illiterate mother is constantly complaining about how google is full of ads and irrelevant information. I'm not sure that people don't notice. It's just they know there's nothing better.

huijzer 3y ago

Microsoft's mission is to "empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more." Maybe not having tons of distractions in the form of advertisements on the search homepage allows people to achieve more.

malfist 3y ago
That might be Microsoft's mission _statement_, but their mission is to make the most profit at all costs
- kingkongjaffa 3y ago
  so is every for-profit business...
  - taosx 3y ago
    I believe there's a sweet spot before companies grow too much where there can still be some ethics behind some business decisions, after that ethics become a byproduct influenced by marketing strategies and public sentiment weighted against market competition and many other factors, basically it transforms into an entity that tries to make as much profit as possible at all costs.
  - diffeomorphism 3y ago
    Yeah, no. That is at best a joke about you taking statements overly literally.
stevenwoo 3y ago
Since they’ve added it, my searches in the mobile app fail about 50 percent of the time because the connection isn’t good enough. I don’t know what they’ve changed but it has some weird connectivity requirements. I only use it for the rewards and now Google is going to match it(at least I got a postcard with an online offer)

ed_elliott_asc 3y ago

I noticed chatgpt uses bing when searching now so expect the market share figure to go up

andai 3y ago

You need to use Edge to use it, right? That might be why.

jehaj 3y ago
Not anymore (for me at least). I am able to use it with Firefox. However I do not know if it has something to do with European regulation.
- pteraspidomorph 3y ago
  Is that a recent development? I can use it on Firefox now as well, but the previous time I checked they were still telling me to use Edge instead.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    It was definitely locked to Edge at launch and for quite a period of time. However it has been open to other browsers for at least a few months now.
    - Tommstein 3y ago
      Too late, they blew their one shot. Ain't no one who tried it when it was new and hyped and was told that they couldn't use it since they weren't using Edge setting reminders to go back occasionally and check whether Microsoft has finally pulled their head out of their ass, it just instantly ceased to exist for them.
      - andai 3y ago
        I tried it a few times but was mostly disappointed with the results. I built a superior solution (for my usage anyway) in like 50 lines of Python. Just uses duckduckgo for search, extracts text from top 8 results, shoves into gpt-3. (I think I got a massive cost reduction by filtering paragraphs with embedding API, but that's just an optimization.) Phind is better than what I built, though. I don't actually use it that much (I'm not sure why—habit? Impatience?), but every time I do I'm surprised with the accuracy. I think a big part of it is which pages to select for sources. Google Bard failed hard here in my testing, gave nonsense answers because its sources were AI generated SEO spam!

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Would like to see chart of Chrome/Edge superimposed on Google/Bing. Usage Rates. I'm using Google less and less, but not using Bing. It is more like Google is not as useful anymore. So would like to see a trend of usage rates, to see if Bing market share didn't go up much, did overall Google usage go down? Market share might have only gone up 1%, but did the overall market shrink.

sottol 3y ago
Market share should be relative, so if there was a stark decline in search bing would have declined close to as much as Google. Unless this is some other measure erroneously labeled as market share .
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Sure I've just seen 'market' share be used to spin things. Like hyping how your market share went UP. But you lost customers, sales were actually DOWN. Just the other guy lost more. So your market share went up. I've been in companies that had bad sales, and they super hyped how market share had gone up like we were winning. But the entire market was shrinking enough that total sales had gone down.
jerpint 3y ago
Google is also less and less “useful” because social media has essentially turned most of online content into content that cannot be indexed by google
- mgiannopoulos 3y ago
  I think after a new Google/Twitter agreement a few months ago, Google started returning tweets in result messages again.

globalnode 3y ago

googles search was so much better than the competition for so long it would take a big drop in quality for people to get fed up and look elsewhere (en mass)

flykespice 3y ago

Tbh I find it annoying everytime it processes for answers when I look for results (I'm using Bing as default engine because I'm stuck on windows 11 and I want to keep it minimally bloated as possible relying only on Edge), waste of cpu resources on my browser I can lookup for answers on my own.

bazil376 3y ago

I think the path to generative AI search needs to be more subtle. Changing it wholesale to a chat interface just kind of confuses people.

magicalhippo 3y ago

I tried it a few times. Was useless. I asked stuff like "how to do X in Y" and it proceeded to give some generic answer about what X was and then something like "how to this in Y is specific to Y". Well duh. I guess it can be interesting if you're after some Wikipedia-like information, but in those cases I just go to Wikipedia or similar. Clearly I lack imagination, so, how to use this in a useful way?

ryanjshaw 3y ago
I have Bing enabled on the family computer by default on Windows for the Family Safety features. I tried searching for "rainbow friends official" yesterday to understand what it is (yes I'm that out of touch). I got tons of what looked like knock offs and spam, with big bright video previews and no official looking site. I switched to Google and found the official site immediately and realised it's a Roblox game, so the Bing results weren't wrong at all but they sure looked wrong. There's just something about Bing that looks bad, I don't know what it is.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >I got tons of what looked like knock offs and spam, with big bright video previews and no official looking site. Same for me on most searches. Bing is far too cluttered and busy, all over the place, making your eyes constantly hunt to find what you're looking for. Microsoft, if you're reading this, simpler is almost always better, no need to make the results page look like an Arch user's terminal session.
  - Reimersholme 3y ago
    [dead]
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    This is what Microsoft will always lack: taste and style. Every once in a while they accidentally (-or not) come up with something that is decent but it doesn’t last, next version is atrocious in some way or another. - Im sure there’s talented professional behind anything that is good and the accident is their decisions surviving the corporate gauntlet of enshitification or expnanding the scope of the project such that it becomes an unpleasant mess, probably obnoxious too.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

"But but but journalists from The Verge told me it's going to take over the world" /s It's a brand issue, people doesn't associate Microsoft with great products, you see it with their gaming division as well, despite insane marketing, they fail to match Sony both in HW and services (Sony has like 3x more, both, console sales and service subscribers than MS) We need less of both, Google and Microsoft both want to be in a monopoly position, which is bad

frou_dh 3y ago
From what I remember of the Xbox 360 days it was seen as a great console vs. the PS3, and the Xbox Live service was seen as far superior, and was popular.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  X360 released 1 year before the PS3, online gaming was booming, same era as WoW and the PSP, released 1 year earlier, was just as good and was the one to popularize online live services, it released with a web browser and online store! and sold as much as the X360, then the PS3 came 1 year later, after the X360 and catched up X360: 84m PS3 87m X1: 58m PS4:117m Xbox (X/S): 25m PS5: 50m (ongoing) Stats and numbers doesn't lie, people didn't stick with what Microsoft had to offer, not good enough

Closi 3y ago

Gaining 1% of market share from a baseline of 2.4% would mean growing their share of the market by 41%

blibble 3y ago
it is not "1%" it is "less than 1%"
- Closi 3y ago
  Good point - so I guess it could be anything from 0% to 40%, although I guess my broader point is that the measure of absolute percentage points could hide significant ‘actual’ growth.
brookst 3y ago
This is the important observation. A 40% CAGR would be terrifying to Google.
- eviks 3y ago
  it's not CAGR since there is nothing to compound

jpeg_hero 3y ago

I asked Perplexity a question. Gave me an answer I accepted, then, thought, better just double check this with a Google search. Nope Perplexity gave me a totally wrong answer. I cannot tell you how upsetting a user experience this was to me. Thinking about canceling my Pro sub off of one wrong answer. Can’t trust it.

ethanbond 3y ago
What was the question, out of curiosity?
- jpeg_hero 3y ago
  it was the dumbest question ever, too! that might have made it worse. "What happens to the virus plot line in the movie Office Space?" something along those lines.
timeon 3y ago
> Can’t trust it. I have similar experience with ChatGPT. Sometimes I'm hesitating to use it because I feel that it is better to not get information then get information which may or may not be true.

zeroclicks 3y ago

How can you determine whether market share add was due to adding the chat?

visarga 3y ago

I mostly use phind.com nowadays. Good search and good LLM.

aio2 3y ago
Same, but can get wrong some times.
midnitewarrior 3y ago
That has also been my experience. I left ChatGPT for phind.com. I tried perplexity, but I found phind to be superior.

Woshiwuja 3y ago

The problem is that i still have to open that bloated piece of garbage website to access it

TheUnhinged 3y ago

Despite Microsoft aggressive push (via Edge)?! Surprised…

amadeuspagel 3y ago

That Microsoft only made Bing Chat available from Edge shows that they still don't understand the web. Everyone uses Chrome today, because they started using Google first, from whatever browser they were using.

salad-tycoon 3y ago
It’s available on safari on iOS and Mac. I think it’s limited to 3 queries without signing in. I think originally it was only bing app or edge app but no longer the case.
midnitewarrior 3y ago
It was available there first. It was a value-add for using Edge over Chrome, and it was somewhat effective for about 3 months like that. I started using Edge to have free access to that and I enjoyed it at the time. That event caused me to take another look at Edge, and I now prefer it to Chrome and use it as my daily driver at work. I am split between Edge and Brave at home. Honestly, Microsoft has done a good job with a browser (finally). It only took them 25 years.

lm28469 3y ago

My parents don't even know about chatgpt, the current gen of ai, &c. and they're not even retired yet. It's a bubble, most peeople don't know about it and most of the people who know about it heard of it through TV/Web news with "AI will replace your job in 6 months" kind of BS. idk why bing would become super popular all of a sudden when a good 90% of the web users are tech illiterate. In most people's head internet = google = chrome (and apple = safari because it just works) Even in my tech literate circles the new flavor of AI is barely used

siva7 3y ago
Your parents aren't exactly a predictor of current or future markets. Most people under 30 with the financial ability to buy a subscription have heard of ChatGPT. That's the only thing that counts in market terms.
- eagleusr 3y ago
  Agreed that origin commenter's two parents are not a great enough sample size to gauge the popularity of generative AI implementations such as ChatGPT.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    The data point is the article and reality. My comment was just part of the answer, aka real world AI usage is nowhere close to what people want to believe here. One commenter says everyone under 30 has a paid chatgpt account, yet chatgpt as a self reported user base of 185 millions, with only 100 millions unique active user per week, a far cry from every people under 30 with a spare 20$. Even if every single one of these people installed bing on all their devices it wouldn't make a dent... chrome is used by more than 3b people. I took a bet last year on this very forum about how chatgpt wouldn't become anywhere to what the HN prophets promised, I can take another bet for 2025 lmao https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/543218/worldwide-internet-users-by-browser/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/543218/worldwide-interne...
- 3y ago

yread 3y ago

What is the percentage of Google searches actually performed by humans? Maybe if we all switched there would still be so much bot traffic the market share would barely moved? Then again I haven't started using it and I don't know anyone who has so at least in my bubble it's not surprising

makeitdouble 3y ago

Following the link to the StatCounter[0] source, it seems bing chat isn't taken into account in the first place, nor do they have an acurate view of the search activity. To add to that since it's an analytics plugin, it could also affect how those pages are ranked in Google and Bing in not so subtle ways. All in all, that feels like very little facts to come up with any opinion on the subject matter. [0] https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology > Is bing chat included in search engine share? > We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don't measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.

gumballindie 3y ago

Ai search is unrealiable and of low quality. It limits discoverability and reduces exposure to novel content and it is no use to businesses. Sadly google is also experimenting with ai and as such their results are of lower quality, but still far better than bing.

elforce002 3y ago

I used chatgpt to try to fix some issues with certbot, docker, and nodejs, I just gave up and went straight to forums, etc... I found out what I was looking for by interacting and putting together the answer out of those interactions. Of course, chatGPT is not "intelligent" to comprehend but that's how "open" AI and tech bros are selling it. I didn't even flinch when Microsoft announced it was going to implement AI in its search engine. Habits are difficult to change. I'm still using Search engines (Brave most of the time and google when I can't find what I'm looking for), tech forums, StackOverflow (Still a tech gold mine), etc... and lastly chatgpt if I have time to write a really good prompt. The bubble is still there, few are paying attention outside it, let alone using it to be "rich". Heck, Crypto Bros are now selling courses on how to monetize chatGPT, and what's worse, people are buying it! It's the same cycle over and over again. Yes, LLMs brought decades of R&D to the forefront of society and put that piece of tech on people's hands yet that doesn't mean everyone will adopt it just because. Our phones are engineering marvels yet we use them for mundane things most of the time.

gremlinsinc 3y ago

I use Bing way more than Google now, but I also love phind for more detailed coding answers. Claude is best for writing prose. I try bard sometimes too, it writes really good SEO and Etsy listings. It's still early days so finding the best solution with ai is still a WIP, since dalle3 came out I've used Bing chat way more. image creator gives you 15 images per day, Bing chat does a better job with images by reiterated prompts with adjustments and gives near unlimited uses if using the chat interface.

WelcomeShorty 3y ago

And my prediction, based on a pool of 3, is that this 1% will be gone a day later. Have you tried co-pilot? It is the worst. My 3 year old gives more coherent answers and paints better images.

deafpolygon 3y ago

I use it daily and I enjoy using it. It's been pretty helpful and I've gotten used to it, so much so that going to Google is just... not useful.

renegat0x0 3y ago

It is not surprising. Default behavior is the king. It is not that easy to change default search on phones. Most of the traffic goes from there. Mobile is the king This will eventually lead to Google downfall, as it may feel overconfident. This may result someday in a sudden shift, change at search. I do not think that search engines have any future. It will be replaced by bots period. It would be dumb for Google to invest any money in normal search. Normies will not want to google anything, or browse links, if computer will be able "to tell", or produce answer instead of links. No further search is required. Search is already dead.

faeriechangling 3y ago

Whenever I open up Bing Chat, I do so accidentally, and it makes me frustrated and want to use Google.

malshe 3y ago

If anything, Bing is pulling down ChatGPT. Whenever ChatGPT uses Bing to search for anything, I know the result is going to be crap. This is quite apparent when I ask a question related to published research findings. Bing does not compare with Google Scholar so ChatGPT is stuck with whatever garbage Bing returns. I found that Claude performs much better than ChatGPT in such cases (I pay for ChatGPT). Now whenever I see ChatGPT using Bing, I head to Claude without even waiting for ChatGPT to complete its response.

stormed 3y ago

My big issue with AI powered search is I don't really trust what it's telling me in terms of news and more specific questions. Sometimes I'll skim what the Bing/Google generation has to say if it takes me longer than 8 seconds to find a relevant link, otherwise I don't find it that enticing of a feature. In terms of Bing Chat, easily the biggest appeal to me is it's based on GPT-4 and includes features for creative/professional writing. I think that alone is the biggest reason to use it over chatGPT 3.5.

chucke1992 3y ago

But does search traffic can be counted like that? I mean when people use chat they don't use the search no?

midnitewarrior 3y ago

There were about 3 months that I thought Bing Chat was an incredible feature that was added for free. Since then, it has been eclipsed by other free generative search like phind.com which are more functional and free. I think the Bing Chat answers have gotten too concise to be useful for anything technical. It's good for quick retrieval of simple things, but I have abandoned it and ChatGPT for phind.com, at least for now. Ask me in 3 months, I may have another system I favor. This space is evolving rapidly.

kromem 3y ago

I sometimes wonder what the outcome would have been if they didn't curb 'Sydney'. In those first few weeks users reported spending hours engaged with the product and that they had some of the most interesting conversations in their life. The interest and engagement quickly died down as the 'errant' human-like behavior was tampered down.

Tommstein 3y ago

I remember going to check it out, and them refusing to let me try it unless I used Edge and/or a Bing account (don't remember exactly and don't care). And that's how they blew their one shot to get me and hordes of others to give a flying fuck about it.

i8comments 3y ago

Bing chat and chatgpt are complementary to duckduckgo, not substitutes.