5 ms·

I'll never understand why Microsoft, with all their resources, never made Bing a better search engine. They don't have to be conservative. It's not their only

I'll never understand why Microsoft, with all their resources, never made Bing a better search engine. They don't have to be conservative. It's not their only cash cow. They can experiment. Instead, they opted to nearly copy Google's UI and leave it at that. I think they would have done a lot better if they invested in a separate company and gave them freedom + lots of resources, like they did with OpenAI.

XenophileJKO 3y ago
My guess is worse bureaucracy and lower average engineering skill. These things matter.
dageshi 3y ago
That's what Microsoft used to do with everything, they had so much money they could just make incredibly bland versions of everyone else's hit products. I assume it's because Wall Street was mithering them about why they hadn't invented said hit product and they built their own versions just to shut Wall Street up while the Windows/Office money flowed in. Bing is a remnant from that time that they never killed.
- chippiewill 3y ago
  I think Bing is more important than that. Bing is an insurance policy against Google having too much control over the internet. I don't think Microsoft care about market share, they care about having a foothold that they could invest in if they needed to without needing to go from a standing start.
- pwarner 3y ago
  Did they stop? Teams is still very much a poor copy of Zoom and Slack. Like they can't even make good copies.
  - discordance 3y ago
    Slack maybe, but I doubt they copied anything from Zoom. The Zoom UX is pretty inconsistent and horrific for some very basic things. E.g. Ever tried to get a chat history from a call that's finished with Zoom?
noduerme 3y ago
My guess is that since they had most Windows boxes in the bag, they didn't really need to throw resources at that department to innovate. Search is really, really hard, and expensive. They had a built-in market, and it's cheaper to grow the market with one big deal than improve your product incrementally.
wslh 3y ago
I would give a simple answer: they don't care. They care about marketing and sales and Bing came "preinstalled" in zillions of computers around the world. That is enough for them. The crux of Microsoft is being harm at their ecosystem (PCs, Windows, Office, Azure, Dev Tools, etc). They are the business drivers. But even if their software and infrastructure is bad, it is used in almost all of the top companies in the world and the switch cost is currently very high.
DinaCoder99 3y ago
People always claim Bing has bad results, but I honestly don't think Google's are any better. Their extra metadata is regularly incorrect and their actual results have been polluted with SEO bullshit and ads for over a decade now. We simply lack any decent search engine and have for a long time.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Maybe the complaint was against the UI of Bing, which isn't great, it's very busy and cluttered. The results are as good or better than Google at this point. It might vary depending on use cases and how proficient you are at using either search engine, but in general Bing is a very strong competitor to Google. As for the UI, Microsoft seems to have given up an any type of UI research after the Office ribbon interface lift. I don't know how you'd improve the UI of a search engine, but Bing could stand a bit of improvement, and so could Google.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Both are polluted with rubbish, but Bing's inability to find it's own features is a bit special (For example if you search "houses for sale near $placename" it surfaces a property search UX which is actually quite neat. If you type "houses for sale in $placename" which is not exactly an obscure variant query, the same feature is completely hidden (although there is a big button saying "houses for sale" that will reorder your search results without surfacing the house search ui). Battling spam is an ongoing battle, the "best" results are subjective, but not being able to find its own features feels like half-arsed implementation.)
  - DinaCoder99 3y ago
    Maybe i'm nuts but I think attempts to be senantically cute with queries almost always backfires. I'd much rather treat it like a full text search.
    - notahacker 3y ago
      Generally I do full text search if I want to find words and phrases in text and natural language queries if I want cute widgets to solve natural language questions. But "house sale $placename" works fwiw!

XenophileJKO 3y ago

My guess is worse bureaucracy and lower average engineering skill. These things matter.

dageshi 3y ago

That's what Microsoft used to do with everything, they had so much money they could just make incredibly bland versions of everyone else's hit products. I assume it's because Wall Street was mithering them about why they hadn't invented said hit product and they built their own versions just to shut Wall Street up while the Windows/Office money flowed in. Bing is a remnant from that time that they never killed.

chippiewill 3y ago
I think Bing is more important than that. Bing is an insurance policy against Google having too much control over the internet. I don't think Microsoft care about market share, they care about having a foothold that they could invest in if they needed to without needing to go from a standing start.
pwarner 3y ago
Did they stop? Teams is still very much a poor copy of Zoom and Slack. Like they can't even make good copies.
- discordance 3y ago
  Slack maybe, but I doubt they copied anything from Zoom. The Zoom UX is pretty inconsistent and horrific for some very basic things. E.g. Ever tried to get a chat history from a call that's finished with Zoom?

noduerme 3y ago

My guess is that since they had most Windows boxes in the bag, they didn't really need to throw resources at that department to innovate. Search is really, really hard, and expensive. They had a built-in market, and it's cheaper to grow the market with one big deal than improve your product incrementally.

wslh 3y ago

I would give a simple answer: they don't care. They care about marketing and sales and Bing came "preinstalled" in zillions of computers around the world. That is enough for them. The crux of Microsoft is being harm at their ecosystem (PCs, Windows, Office, Azure, Dev Tools, etc). They are the business drivers. But even if their software and infrastructure is bad, it is used in almost all of the top companies in the world and the switch cost is currently very high.

DinaCoder99 3y ago

People always claim Bing has bad results, but I honestly don't think Google's are any better. Their extra metadata is regularly incorrect and their actual results have been polluted with SEO bullshit and ads for over a decade now. We simply lack any decent search engine and have for a long time.

mrweasel 3y ago
Maybe the complaint was against the UI of Bing, which isn't great, it's very busy and cluttered. The results are as good or better than Google at this point. It might vary depending on use cases and how proficient you are at using either search engine, but in general Bing is a very strong competitor to Google. As for the UI, Microsoft seems to have given up an any type of UI research after the Office ribbon interface lift. I don't know how you'd improve the UI of a search engine, but Bing could stand a bit of improvement, and so could Google.
notahacker 3y ago
Both are polluted with rubbish, but Bing's inability to find it's own features is a bit special (For example if you search "houses for sale near $placename" it surfaces a property search UX which is actually quite neat. If you type "houses for sale in $placename" which is not exactly an obscure variant query, the same feature is completely hidden (although there is a big button saying "houses for sale" that will reorder your search results without surfacing the house search ui). Battling spam is an ongoing battle, the "best" results are subjective, but not being able to find its own features feels like half-arsed implementation.)
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  Maybe i'm nuts but I think attempts to be senantically cute with queries almost always backfires. I'd much rather treat it like a full text search.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Generally I do full text search if I want to find words and phrases in text and natural language queries if I want cute widgets to solve natural language questions. But "house sale $placename" works fwiw!