4 ms·

Apparently Bing Is Something Of A Hit

42 points by vaksel 17y ago

Retric 17y ago
Bing seems to really like a few sites (Wikipedia, Amazon), but it's not quite up to Google search results. PS: Some of the differences are just funny. Retric in Google = Hacker News profile, Retric in Bing = Slashdot Profile.
- jm4 17y ago
  PS: Some of the differences are just funny. Retric in Google = Hacker News profile, Retric in Bing = Slashdot Profile. Slashdot has been around for over a decade. It has a PageRank of 9 versus 6 for HN. I would imagine Bing has a similar metric for measuring the popularity of a site. It seems to make sense that the Slashdot profile would rank higher. What I think is really interesting is why Google ranked the HN profile higher. I'm thinking freshness is weighted much higher on Google than it is on Bing. I've done similar searches on both and while both yield relevant results I'm more likely to see older content on Bing.
Raphael_Amiard 17y ago
I didn't like the search results. It tries to guess on what you want, and as a techie i guess i'm more used to specifying myself what i want to search.
- bitwize 17y ago
  Would you like them better if the Google logo were floating at the top of the page?
  - Raphael_Amiard 17y ago
    I was refering to actual search results, for the same search, with comparison from both search engines. I might be totally wrong, and the issue is in a good part subjective. That's why i did put the words "I didn't like", and not "The results are plain bad". Implying i was just influenced by the brand, while it may have seemed clever to you, is rude , gross ,and totally unrelated to what i said.
- lucumo 17y ago
  > It tries to guess on what you want Unfortunately, Google is far worse in that respect. I've had occassions where my search query was automatically "corrected" to search for the exact opposite of what I want. Not too worrisome, if it weren't for the annoying fact that the only way to notice that was by finding (!) a note in normal font at the bottom of the page. That happened a bit too often. I'm now a Yahoo Search user.
  - timcederman 17y ago
    I get quite a few people coming to my blog about this issue, and emailing me because Google is so hopeless for this one particular query: http://www.cederman.com/?p=133 http://www.cederman.com/?p=133
- thorax 17y ago
  I feel like I'm starting to spam this, but check this out if you don't like the results, it makes it look more Googly and does the trick for me: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649
madair 17y ago
There will be inevitable negatives comparisons to Google, and perhaps some of them are right. I'm just pleased it's working well enough for me and that there is finally now a viable competitor to Google.
- litewulf 17y ago
  Just wondering, why is it important to have a viable competitor to Google? Are you worried about corporate shenanigans, or a single point of failure or something entirely else?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - madair 17y ago
    The danger of all monopolies. I'm not trying to troll or promote irrational fear, but I feel that the competition has been too weak. The hegemony of a single organization which has a clearly stated philosophical viewpoint with a desire to index all information quite simply poses risks which others have described better than I can claim to. By diversifying those risks I hope we can reduce the potential problems. I'm not saying that Microsoft is the antidote, just that I am glad to see competition. I hope there is more forthcoming.
  - dminor 17y ago
    >Just wondering, why is it important to have a viable competitor to Google? From an economic standpoint, it's probably most important to search engine advertisers.
  - skinnymuch 17y ago
    Try getting customer support with Adsense or Adwords (almost all of Google's money source). It'll suck or be non-existant. Oh...that is unless your in the 1% of top spenders.
noodle 17y ago
i have to admit, it is surprisingly good. not better than google, but it presents itself as a quality alternative. several steps up from live. given some more time to chisel away at it, MS might have something which could seriously compete with google in the future.
- 10ren 17y ago
  The results seem similar to Google. I wonder if PageRank litigation is a possibility.
  - noodle 17y ago
    possible, but that would be one hell of an epic court case. probably wouldn't even be worthwhile to try and jump into that. both sides would probably lose a lot, on multiple levels.
    - 10ren 17y ago
      Yes, I was thinking PR. Odd fact: Yahoo appears to have a license for PageRank (Yahoo bought overture/goto, whose patent Google infringed with AdWords auction). GOOG-MS might cross-license too.
  - litewulf 17y ago
    (Sidenote: Google search is not just PageRank. Many of the recent changes to search require more than just a better popularity metric. Obvious things are things like better stemming or stop wording which are quite tricky to get right.)
- rgoddard 17y ago
  The biggest thing for me, is that it did not feel like Microsoft made it, plus it felt faster. Google 3.7s, Bing 1.57s, and actually was. Although this could change depending on how well Bing is able to scale.
- amichail 17y ago
  You get better results by choosing US mode. Compare for example the google wave query for US and Canada modes. But even comparing US modes across both search engines shows Google to be better. For example, try scala tutorial, symbolic algebra system, and iphone app reviews.
10ren 17y ago
Nice point that there is a little google lock-in, when people have learnt how to find things with google. It's not just the query syntax, but also that we've learnt what kinds of answers it gets back.
- 10ren 17y ago
  Thinking further: lock-in doesn't give you much competitive advantage in comp tech - but it does grant you a buffer against competitors. It buys you time, to match their improvement, or even improve on them. Therefore, in tech, I think competitive advantage should be measured in time * : our good image gives us 1 week; user inertia is 1 year; adapting to another interface is 3 weeks; our server farm speed is 6 months; PageRank is 2 months. These times only come into play when a competitor offers something better in some way (if there's nothing better, then these timers aren't engaged). It's like a better product is a pressure or voltage differential, and the competitive advantage is the resistance. Of course, when you're ahead is the time to grow your competitive advantage, even though it's not needed, so that you have it when it is needed. It's an investment. The parts of the model are: the users you have; the relative attractiveness of a competing product; and what stops your users from switching. Actually, I think this is just one kind of competitive advantage, and it only covers existing users (not new ones). For a start up, it's not enough to just retain users, you need to get them in the first place. You're better off focusing on getting them (by increasing the relative attractiveness of your product) rather than stopping them from switching... but Warren Buffett is always going on about competitive advantage - what exactly does he mean? [ * ] for half their users to switch
jcapote 17y ago
Meanwhile Windows continues to rot away; Remind me why they need to be so into search again?
callahad 17y ago
Definitely not a bad option, but as Mr. Arrington says, "I’m used to Google and I know how to find the things I’m looking for." I honestly cannot think of a time in the past year where Google has failed to locate sufficiently relevant information for a given query. If Google ever disappoints, I'll definitely fail over to Bing, but those days will be few and far between. (And I do have a few presentation nits with Bing. I've seen a sponsored links block inserted ~250ms after the results rendered, immediately shifting the result positions and interrupting my skimming of the page. I can't open image results in tabs using Chrome, and their content wrapping for image results, Wikipedia pages, etc. feels a bit heavy-handed).
- Flemlord 17y ago
  I'm not so sure. Don't forget that IE has larger market share than the rest put together. There's a lot of ways MS could leverage their existing monopolies to bind search in. Maybe context searching from MS Office documents, putting a Bing search box on the Windows 7 taskbar... If Bing is "good enough", then Google could have a big problem.
  - callahad 17y ago
    Why wasn't Live Search able to take advantage of the same affiliation?
    - thorax 17y ago
      Who says it didn't? Maybe Google's marketshare (near monopoly?) would be even more unassailable had it not been for Microsoft's (near) monopoly in the browser space.
- timcederman 17y ago
  To be honest, I've felt Google has been 'babying' me too much in the last year. I've had part of my queries dropped, different intent inferred and weird verb stemming applied to my searches. In the last 6 months there have been at least a dozen occasions where I've felt the results are total crap for no good reason. (mind you, that's out of 15,000 searches according to my Google search history) There's also the general problem of too many commercial pages when you're trying to get information, not a product. However Bing, et al, seems to suffer from the same thing. (eg, try finding out information about the Shoreline Amphitheatre VIP lounge experience. There are sites out there which discuss it, but it took a ridiculous number of permutations of search terms to finally find them)
paulgb 17y ago
I like the preview of the content when you hover over the result. It's interesting that Wikipedia pages can be viewed as pages on Bing.com. I think that's a feature that came from Powerset. It's a reasonable competitor to Google, but I was hoping for a feature or two that would really impress me. Everything I see so far is an incremental improvement at best.
calambrac 17y ago
I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today, just as an experiment. I can't tell if what frustration I am experiencing is just due to not being used to it, but I will say that any other time I've tried doing this (Yahoo, Live, Ask), I've quickly switched back to Google simply because I couldn't get my work done. The fact that it's been more than an hour and I haven't given up on it says a lot.
- froo 17y ago
  I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today I must admit I've just started to do the same and am getting the same result. I quickly added bing and its not sucking... .. as someone who wrote off Microsoft only a few months ago and still on my "Fuck yeah, open source! Fuck Microsoft!" high, I'm feeling a little conflicted. Well done Microsoft.
  - trezor 17y ago
    Not to deliberately derail the thread or anything, but if you in any way associate using google search with promoting open-source, you are doing something wrong. Google search is (too) as proprietary as it gets. As for bing, I gave it a shot. After switching to the US version it was a whole new product. My biggest complaint so far is the lack of intelligent porn-searches :P
    - calambrac 17y ago
      The search is proprietary, but the company itself is one of (if not the) largest supporters of open source software out there. http://code.google.com/opensource/ http://code.google.com/opensource/ Using Google for search makes Google money. Google reinvests a not-too-shabby amount of that money back into open source software. Ergo, using Google search promotes open source.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
      - 17y ago
pc 17y ago
If you want to test Bing in Safari, try: $ curl collison.ie/code/bing-safari-patch.rb | ruby It'll replace Google with Bing in Safari's search box in the top right. (Of course, you should read the code before running it.)
- evgen 17y ago
  Or go get the glims safari extension so that you can add whatever search provider you want for the search box and also pick up a bunch of other neat safari tweaks (how I survived without the ability to undo a close tab I will never know... :)
- marcogomes 17y ago
  "I don't know how to patch this version of Safari" I'm using Safari version 4.0 (5530.17)
radu_floricica 17y ago
The problem with new search engines is not only how good they are, but that google is _the_ standard. Every website who wants to be visible is google-optimised, so it will be hard for a contender to be both original and successful.
cnlwsu 17y ago
I was a little excited after reading the article, alas I was disappointed when I tried it out. Seems to do everything in its power to avoid displaying blogspot, google mail lists, and google code projects. It didnt display as much about me as when I searched my name on google - did not even have my blog which has my name in the DNS :( . When I searched for dojango I was very disapointed... "Results are included for django" could have been changed to "Results were replaced with this search that we think you meant" To top things off, it seems to temporarily freeze my Ubuntu's installation of FF every time I move my mouse around the page.
kwamenum86 17y ago
uuuh...guys? I think Bing might be better than Google....what do I do?
nathanwdavis 17y ago
I'm happy with it - my site comes in at #8 on it, instead of #10 on Google for my target keywords "etf screener". Besides that though it does exceed my expectations.
jzachary 17y ago
I like Bing. It does a much better job for image search and presentation than Google. The thing that will make Bing competitive with Google, however, will be the front page. Google has adhered to a simple front page with religious zealotry. Bing, on the other hand, seems to embrace making the front search page more useful. It remains to be seen if MS will clutter it up, but if Google starts adding widgets and tools to the front page, you will know they are paying attention.
evanmoran 17y ago
Personally I'm still enamored with WolframAlpha, though Bing has a distinct edge in ease of typing=). I realize that (for now) these sites are apples to oranges, but I would welcome any move by Microsoft/Google to take on Wolfram. Perhaps Bing will go this way? They have a lot of smart filtering, and the endless image search is just fun.

42 points by vaksel 17y ago

Bing seems to really like a few sites (Wikipedia, Amazon), but it's not quite up to Google search results. PS: Some of the differences are just funny. Retric in Google = Hacker News profile, Retric in Bing = Slashdot Profile.

jm4 17y ago
PS: Some of the differences are just funny. Retric in Google = Hacker News profile, Retric in Bing = Slashdot Profile. Slashdot has been around for over a decade. It has a PageRank of 9 versus 6 for HN. I would imagine Bing has a similar metric for measuring the popularity of a site. It seems to make sense that the Slashdot profile would rank higher. What I think is really interesting is why Google ranked the HN profile higher. I'm thinking freshness is weighted much higher on Google than it is on Bing. I've done similar searches on both and while both yield relevant results I'm more likely to see older content on Bing.

Raphael_Amiard 17y ago

I didn't like the search results. It tries to guess on what you want, and as a techie i guess i'm more used to specifying myself what i want to search.

bitwize 17y ago
Would you like them better if the Google logo were floating at the top of the page?
- Raphael_Amiard 17y ago
  I was refering to actual search results, for the same search, with comparison from both search engines. I might be totally wrong, and the issue is in a good part subjective. That's why i did put the words "I didn't like", and not "The results are plain bad". Implying i was just influenced by the brand, while it may have seemed clever to you, is rude , gross ,and totally unrelated to what i said.
lucumo 17y ago
> It tries to guess on what you want Unfortunately, Google is far worse in that respect. I've had occassions where my search query was automatically "corrected" to search for the exact opposite of what I want. Not too worrisome, if it weren't for the annoying fact that the only way to notice that was by finding (!) a note in normal font at the bottom of the page. That happened a bit too often. I'm now a Yahoo Search user.
- timcederman 17y ago
  I get quite a few people coming to my blog about this issue, and emailing me because Google is so hopeless for this one particular query: http://www.cederman.com/?p=133 http://www.cederman.com/?p=133
thorax 17y ago
I feel like I'm starting to spam this, but check this out if you don't like the results, it makes it look more Googly and does the trick for me: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50649

madair 17y ago

There will be inevitable negatives comparisons to Google, and perhaps some of them are right. I'm just pleased it's working well enough for me and that there is finally now a viable competitor to Google.

litewulf 17y ago
Just wondering, why is it important to have a viable competitor to Google? Are you worried about corporate shenanigans, or a single point of failure or something entirely else?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- madair 17y ago
  The danger of all monopolies. I'm not trying to troll or promote irrational fear, but I feel that the competition has been too weak. The hegemony of a single organization which has a clearly stated philosophical viewpoint with a desire to index all information quite simply poses risks which others have described better than I can claim to. By diversifying those risks I hope we can reduce the potential problems. I'm not saying that Microsoft is the antidote, just that I am glad to see competition. I hope there is more forthcoming.
- dminor 17y ago
  >Just wondering, why is it important to have a viable competitor to Google? From an economic standpoint, it's probably most important to search engine advertisers.
- skinnymuch 17y ago
  Try getting customer support with Adsense or Adwords (almost all of Google's money source). It'll suck or be non-existant. Oh...that is unless your in the 1% of top spenders.

noodle 17y ago

i have to admit, it is surprisingly good. not better than google, but it presents itself as a quality alternative. several steps up from live. given some more time to chisel away at it, MS might have something which could seriously compete with google in the future.

10ren 17y ago
The results seem similar to Google. I wonder if PageRank litigation is a possibility.
- noodle 17y ago
  possible, but that would be one hell of an epic court case. probably wouldn't even be worthwhile to try and jump into that. both sides would probably lose a lot, on multiple levels.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    Yes, I was thinking PR. Odd fact: Yahoo appears to have a license for PageRank (Yahoo bought overture/goto, whose patent Google infringed with AdWords auction). GOOG-MS might cross-license too.
- litewulf 17y ago
  (Sidenote: Google search is not just PageRank. Many of the recent changes to search require more than just a better popularity metric. Obvious things are things like better stemming or stop wording which are quite tricky to get right.)
rgoddard 17y ago
The biggest thing for me, is that it did not feel like Microsoft made it, plus it felt faster. Google 3.7s, Bing 1.57s, and actually was. Although this could change depending on how well Bing is able to scale.
amichail 17y ago
You get better results by choosing US mode. Compare for example the google wave query for US and Canada modes. But even comparing US modes across both search engines shows Google to be better. For example, try scala tutorial, symbolic algebra system, and iphone app reviews.

10ren 17y ago

Nice point that there is a little google lock-in, when people have learnt how to find things with google. It's not just the query syntax, but also that we've learnt what kinds of answers it gets back.

10ren 17y ago
Thinking further: lock-in doesn't give you much competitive advantage in comp tech - but it does grant you a buffer against competitors. It buys you time, to match their improvement, or even improve on them. Therefore, in tech, I think competitive advantage should be measured in time * : our good image gives us 1 week; user inertia is 1 year; adapting to another interface is 3 weeks; our server farm speed is 6 months; PageRank is 2 months. These times only come into play when a competitor offers something better in some way (if there's nothing better, then these timers aren't engaged). It's like a better product is a pressure or voltage differential, and the competitive advantage is the resistance. Of course, when you're ahead is the time to grow your competitive advantage, even though it's not needed, so that you have it when it is needed. It's an investment. The parts of the model are: the users you have; the relative attractiveness of a competing product; and what stops your users from switching. Actually, I think this is just one kind of competitive advantage, and it only covers existing users (not new ones). For a start up, it's not enough to just retain users, you need to get them in the first place. You're better off focusing on getting them (by increasing the relative attractiveness of your product) rather than stopping them from switching... but Warren Buffett is always going on about competitive advantage - what exactly does he mean? [ * ] for half their users to switch

jcapote 17y ago

Meanwhile Windows continues to rot away; Remind me why they need to be so into search again?

callahad 17y ago

Definitely not a bad option, but as Mr. Arrington says, "I’m used to Google and I know how to find the things I’m looking for." I honestly cannot think of a time in the past year where Google has failed to locate sufficiently relevant information for a given query. If Google ever disappoints, I'll definitely fail over to Bing, but those days will be few and far between. (And I do have a few presentation nits with Bing. I've seen a sponsored links block inserted ~250ms after the results rendered, immediately shifting the result positions and interrupting my skimming of the page. I can't open image results in tabs using Chrome, and their content wrapping for image results, Wikipedia pages, etc. feels a bit heavy-handed).

Flemlord 17y ago
I'm not so sure. Don't forget that IE has larger market share than the rest put together. There's a lot of ways MS could leverage their existing monopolies to bind search in. Maybe context searching from MS Office documents, putting a Bing search box on the Windows 7 taskbar... If Bing is "good enough", then Google could have a big problem.
- callahad 17y ago
  Why wasn't Live Search able to take advantage of the same affiliation?
  - thorax 17y ago
    Who says it didn't? Maybe Google's marketshare (near monopoly?) would be even more unassailable had it not been for Microsoft's (near) monopoly in the browser space.
timcederman 17y ago
To be honest, I've felt Google has been 'babying' me too much in the last year. I've had part of my queries dropped, different intent inferred and weird verb stemming applied to my searches. In the last 6 months there have been at least a dozen occasions where I've felt the results are total crap for no good reason. (mind you, that's out of 15,000 searches according to my Google search history) There's also the general problem of too many commercial pages when you're trying to get information, not a product. However Bing, et al, seems to suffer from the same thing. (eg, try finding out information about the Shoreline Amphitheatre VIP lounge experience. There are sites out there which discuss it, but it took a ridiculous number of permutations of search terms to finally find them)

paulgb 17y ago

I like the preview of the content when you hover over the result. It's interesting that Wikipedia pages can be viewed as pages on Bing.com. I think that's a feature that came from Powerset. It's a reasonable competitor to Google, but I was hoping for a feature or two that would really impress me. Everything I see so far is an incremental improvement at best.

calambrac 17y ago

I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today, just as an experiment. I can't tell if what frustration I am experiencing is just due to not being used to it, but I will say that any other time I've tried doing this (Yahoo, Live, Ask), I've quickly switched back to Google simply because I couldn't get my work done. The fact that it's been more than an hour and I haven't given up on it says a lot.

froo 17y ago
I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today I must admit I've just started to do the same and am getting the same result. I quickly added bing and its not sucking... .. as someone who wrote off Microsoft only a few months ago and still on my "Fuck yeah, open source! Fuck Microsoft!" high, I'm feeling a little conflicted. Well done Microsoft.
- trezor 17y ago
  Not to deliberately derail the thread or anything, but if you in any way associate using google search with promoting open-source, you are doing something wrong. Google search is (too) as proprietary as it gets. As for bing, I gave it a shot. After switching to the US version it was a whole new product. My biggest complaint so far is the lack of intelligent porn-searches :P
  - calambrac 17y ago
    The search is proprietary, but the company itself is one of (if not the) largest supporters of open source software out there. http://code.google.com/opensource/ http://code.google.com/opensource/ Using Google for search makes Google money. Google reinvests a not-too-shabby amount of that money back into open source software. Ergo, using Google search promotes open source.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - 17y ago

pc 17y ago

If you want to test Bing in Safari, try: $ curl collison.ie/code/bing-safari-patch.rb | ruby It'll replace Google with Bing in Safari's search box in the top right. (Of course, you should read the code before running it.)

evgen 17y ago
Or go get the glims safari extension so that you can add whatever search provider you want for the search box and also pick up a bunch of other neat safari tweaks (how I survived without the ability to undo a close tab I will never know... :)
marcogomes 17y ago
"I don't know how to patch this version of Safari" I'm using Safari version 4.0 (5530.17)

radu_floricica 17y ago

The problem with new search engines is not only how good they are, but that google is _the_ standard. Every website who wants to be visible is google-optimised, so it will be hard for a contender to be both original and successful.

cnlwsu 17y ago

I was a little excited after reading the article, alas I was disappointed when I tried it out. Seems to do everything in its power to avoid displaying blogspot, google mail lists, and google code projects. It didnt display as much about me as when I searched my name on google - did not even have my blog which has my name in the DNS :( . When I searched for dojango I was very disapointed... "Results are included for django" could have been changed to "Results were replaced with this search that we think you meant" To top things off, it seems to temporarily freeze my Ubuntu's installation of FF every time I move my mouse around the page.

kwamenum86 17y ago

uuuh...guys? I think Bing might be better than Google....what do I do?

nathanwdavis 17y ago

I'm happy with it - my site comes in at #8 on it, instead of #10 on Google for my target keywords "etf screener". Besides that though it does exceed my expectations.

jzachary 17y ago

I like Bing. It does a much better job for image search and presentation than Google. The thing that will make Bing competitive with Google, however, will be the front page. Google has adhered to a simple front page with religious zealotry. Bing, on the other hand, seems to embrace making the front search page more useful. It remains to be seen if MS will clutter it up, but if Google starts adding widgets and tools to the front page, you will know they are paying attention.

evanmoran 17y ago

Personally I'm still enamored with WolframAlpha, though Bing has a distinct edge in ease of typing=). I realize that (for now) these sites are apples to oranges, but I would welcome any move by Microsoft/Google to take on Wolfram. Perhaps Bing will go this way? They have a lot of smart filtering, and the endless image search is just fun.