4 ms·

I enjoy hating on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but as far as I'm concerned Bing is basically as good as Google. The problem for Microsoft is the same pro

I enjoy hating on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but as far as I'm concerned Bing is basically as good as Google. The problem for Microsoft is the same problem that faced Apple. Being "as good as" isn't enough to get people to switch. You have to be 10 times better. Back when Google launched, it was 10x better than Yahoo. Bing seems to have quickly gotten to 1x, but hasn't moved much further.

username223 13y ago
"The problem for Microsoft is the same problem that faced Apple." Pretty much: Apple was faced with a competitor who owned a vast majority of the PC market. They never took over the majority, but they managed to earn a profit from a minority of people who were willing to pay a premium for computers that worked better than the crapware offered by most Windows OEMs. Windows was cheap, and just good enough to write TPS reports. Google now offers similar crapware: heavily-gamed and -"personalized" search results slathered with ads and just good enough to be better than most alternatives. There's plenty of room for a company to offer something better: paid subscription search, less-complete search with fewer ads and more accuracy, or something else (I'm not a "10x founder," so I can't think of these things.).
naner 13y ago
Bing and DDG are good for stuff that is easy to find. If you rely on a search engine a lot they fall short about 20% of the time.
FreeFull 13y ago
I still regularly make searches in duckduckgo (which gets results from Bing) and then find that I have to switch Google to actually find what I'm looking for. The worst thing about this is that Google's results don't seem to be as good as they used to be, and there isn't really any other search engine that matches it yet that I've seen.
- s3r3nity 13y ago
  Hmmm but DDG will never be quite as good as Bing or Google simply because DDG doesn't keep any histories or track any other activity. Really good search engines get quality and relevance from all those things that DDG purports NOT to track. It's partly a machine learning problem that I just am very very skeptical DDG can get around.
  - gedrap 13y ago
    Exactly. Personally, only a very small fraction of my searches are 'random', about something I've never browsed about before. However, most of my searches are either very predictable (related to stuff I browse, search every day). Or I'm searching for something I've browsed already just didn't bookmark or can't bother to find because I know google will find it.
  - rsl7 13y ago
    I don't think this is true unless you are truly locked into your own tiny little world. All your search history really does is help Google serve up ads for you. If that's an improvement, so be it.
    - jkrems 13y ago
      Many programming language related terms, movie titles, cities/postal codes, ... All those things can be judged better when the search engine has prior knowledge about you. You don't have to be "truly locked into your own tiny little world" to have previous search be a valuable predictor of what kind of results you expect.
    - chipotle_coyote 13y ago
      Google keeps track of what sources you're more frequently clicking on and weights results subtly but noticeably. If you look up things on Wikipedia a lot, Wikipedia pages will be ranked higher. If you're more likely to click over to the BBC than to Fox when you read a news source, the BBC will be higher and Fox will be lower.
  - aaronsnoswell 13y ago
    This reminds me of a relevant quote from my AI Professor's slides: "An algorithm that forgets it's past is doomed to repeat it"
- joelrunyon 13y ago
  This. Google's updates recently have made the results worse than ever. I wish there was a solid alternative.
robrenaud 13y ago
Why not switch as soon as you believe the other search engine is even an epsilon better? It's not like you need to buy an entirely new computer and learn to use a new operating system to switch between Bing and Google.
- na85 13y ago
  I choose to stick with google because given the choice, I'd rather see them succeed than microsoft. We're in the predictable phase where everyone hates google now because they're no longer the next big thing, but I'm not a hipster and I don't think microsoft is now the underdog so I don't get the google animosity and I don't get the sudden warmth towards microsoft. Quite frankly I fucking hate windows, and I wish it would just go away entirely. To that end I avoid giving microsoft money at every opportunity.
jorgecastillo 13y ago
I don't think Bing is as good as Google, no other search engine in the world can compete with Google, at least when it comes to content in English. Google can almost read my mind, I can't say the same about competing search engines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504324
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  There is an interesting dichotomy here. Google does read your mind, in the sense that it uses available information from both your previous searching history and your existing interests in gmail, G+, and basically any web site with a +1 button. So when you search for something it takes all the things that it knows about, prioritizes by the things it knows you are interested in (this is the mind reading part), and then picks the best result to show you. Voila, great result. If the last web site you visited was for the Audubon Society and the next thing you search for is Cardinals you will get a page about birds on the first result, but if you had just recently looked for tickets to a ball game on Ticketmaster you will get the baseball team as your first result. One of the more fascinating things that DDG's "Dontbubbleme" campaign did, was expose just how big a swing in the results your 'meta data' has. People who are running Chrome and are "logged into Google" get very different results than people who make a query with no context following them around. In the latter case everyone has to resort to giving you the pages that "most" people clicked on from your geographic region [1]. Bing and Google have pretty much exact equivalence if you remove tracking and geo context. (IP blind / cookie blind / search). [1] For even more fun, set up proxy servers in various data centers around the country and do searches with no cookies or context, and proxied to different geographies. Very enlightening.
  - jorgecastillo 13y ago
    I use Chromium (logged in) as my main browser but if I try this queries in Firefox with a clean profile I get the expected results. So no Bing and Google are not equivalent I get much better results with Google. Next semester when I return to school I'll check my queries from the school network to see if Google gives me the expected result from there. Either way I like Google more than Microsoft and I rather switch to Yandex than to Bing if it ever comes to that.
User8712 13y ago
Here's a feature, let me add weight to my search results. I want to give preference to stackoverflow, HN, reddit, etc. I don't want to limit my search to only those sites, but I'd like to push them a little closer to the top. Also, let me setup a blacklist of sites to exclude. I don't want to see expertexchange... ever. I should be able to share my custom search setup with others, kind of like how AdBlock has subscriptions, I could select popular setups, or build my own. And, what if I could select my settings in a dropdown when searching. So, maybe the people at HN setup a whitelist of 100 of the best sites for programming help. I add this list to my account. Now, anytime I want to search for a programming question, I type in the query, select my custom search type from the dropdown, 'programming questions', and then click search. I'll only get results from those 100 sites. Google will never implement this for a variety of reasons, so it's room for competition.
- jessedhillon 13y ago
  I am not 100% sure but I believe that Google has some of this ground covered. If I do a search for "Java" (for example, not sure this particular term will produce distinct results) while logged into my Google account, I will get different results than if my non-programming friends searched for "Java." Again, not totally certain that this is the case but I have seen some evidence before that search results are customized based on past behavior and other models of my preferences.
- throwawaykf03 13y ago
  Actually Google did implement something like this: you could "personalize" your search by moving results up and down the page. They discontinued it some time (just a few months?) later... I'm guessing because it created more noise than signal. This was some years ago.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    Yeah, it was SearchWiki, launched in 2008, discontinued sometime in early 2011 IIRC. About the only thing people used it for was to kill expertsexchange.com, and that problem took care of itself when StackOverflow got popular.
lelandriordan 13y ago
I have used Bing for years as my primary search engine simply because of Bing rewards. MS essentially pays me to do search (I get about $10 in Amazon gift cards a month from Bing Rewards Gold). At first I found myself first searching on Bing and then going back to Google. Over time however as I have made tens of thousands of searchs, Bing pretty much nails what I want everytime. It took like a year but the gap is pretty much closed. Now I feel like Google's are a little worse because they have way less data and Bing has way more.

username223 13y ago

"The problem for Microsoft is the same problem that faced Apple." Pretty much: Apple was faced with a competitor who owned a vast majority of the PC market. They never took over the majority, but they managed to earn a profit from a minority of people who were willing to pay a premium for computers that worked better than the crapware offered by most Windows OEMs. Windows was cheap, and just good enough to write TPS reports. Google now offers similar crapware: heavily-gamed and -"personalized" search results slathered with ads and just good enough to be better than most alternatives. There's plenty of room for a company to offer something better: paid subscription search, less-complete search with fewer ads and more accuracy, or something else (I'm not a "10x founder," so I can't think of these things.).

naner 13y ago

Bing and DDG are good for stuff that is easy to find. If you rely on a search engine a lot they fall short about 20% of the time.

FreeFull 13y ago

I still regularly make searches in duckduckgo (which gets results from Bing) and then find that I have to switch Google to actually find what I'm looking for. The worst thing about this is that Google's results don't seem to be as good as they used to be, and there isn't really any other search engine that matches it yet that I've seen.

s3r3nity 13y ago
Hmmm but DDG will never be quite as good as Bing or Google simply because DDG doesn't keep any histories or track any other activity. Really good search engines get quality and relevance from all those things that DDG purports NOT to track. It's partly a machine learning problem that I just am very very skeptical DDG can get around.
- gedrap 13y ago
  Exactly. Personally, only a very small fraction of my searches are 'random', about something I've never browsed about before. However, most of my searches are either very predictable (related to stuff I browse, search every day). Or I'm searching for something I've browsed already just didn't bookmark or can't bother to find because I know google will find it.
- rsl7 13y ago
  I don't think this is true unless you are truly locked into your own tiny little world. All your search history really does is help Google serve up ads for you. If that's an improvement, so be it.
  - jkrems 13y ago
    Many programming language related terms, movie titles, cities/postal codes, ... All those things can be judged better when the search engine has prior knowledge about you. You don't have to be "truly locked into your own tiny little world" to have previous search be a valuable predictor of what kind of results you expect.
  - chipotle_coyote 13y ago
    Google keeps track of what sources you're more frequently clicking on and weights results subtly but noticeably. If you look up things on Wikipedia a lot, Wikipedia pages will be ranked higher. If you're more likely to click over to the BBC than to Fox when you read a news source, the BBC will be higher and Fox will be lower.
- aaronsnoswell 13y ago
  This reminds me of a relevant quote from my AI Professor's slides: "An algorithm that forgets it's past is doomed to repeat it"
joelrunyon 13y ago
This. Google's updates recently have made the results worse than ever. I wish there was a solid alternative.

robrenaud 13y ago

Why not switch as soon as you believe the other search engine is even an epsilon better? It's not like you need to buy an entirely new computer and learn to use a new operating system to switch between Bing and Google.

na85 13y ago
I choose to stick with google because given the choice, I'd rather see them succeed than microsoft. We're in the predictable phase where everyone hates google now because they're no longer the next big thing, but I'm not a hipster and I don't think microsoft is now the underdog so I don't get the google animosity and I don't get the sudden warmth towards microsoft. Quite frankly I fucking hate windows, and I wish it would just go away entirely. To that end I avoid giving microsoft money at every opportunity.

jorgecastillo 13y ago

I don't think Bing is as good as Google, no other search engine in the world can compete with Google, at least when it comes to content in English. Google can almost read my mind, I can't say the same about competing search engines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504324

ChuckMcM 13y ago
There is an interesting dichotomy here. Google does read your mind, in the sense that it uses available information from both your previous searching history and your existing interests in gmail, G+, and basically any web site with a +1 button. So when you search for something it takes all the things that it knows about, prioritizes by the things it knows you are interested in (this is the mind reading part), and then picks the best result to show you. Voila, great result. If the last web site you visited was for the Audubon Society and the next thing you search for is Cardinals you will get a page about birds on the first result, but if you had just recently looked for tickets to a ball game on Ticketmaster you will get the baseball team as your first result. One of the more fascinating things that DDG's "Dontbubbleme" campaign did, was expose just how big a swing in the results your 'meta data' has. People who are running Chrome and are "logged into Google" get very different results than people who make a query with no context following them around. In the latter case everyone has to resort to giving you the pages that "most" people clicked on from your geographic region [1]. Bing and Google have pretty much exact equivalence if you remove tracking and geo context. (IP blind / cookie blind / search). [1] For even more fun, set up proxy servers in various data centers around the country and do searches with no cookies or context, and proxied to different geographies. Very enlightening.
- jorgecastillo 13y ago
  I use Chromium (logged in) as my main browser but if I try this queries in Firefox with a clean profile I get the expected results. So no Bing and Google are not equivalent I get much better results with Google. Next semester when I return to school I'll check my queries from the school network to see if Google gives me the expected result from there. Either way I like Google more than Microsoft and I rather switch to Yandex than to Bing if it ever comes to that.

User8712 13y ago

Here's a feature, let me add weight to my search results. I want to give preference to stackoverflow, HN, reddit, etc. I don't want to limit my search to only those sites, but I'd like to push them a little closer to the top. Also, let me setup a blacklist of sites to exclude. I don't want to see expertexchange... ever. I should be able to share my custom search setup with others, kind of like how AdBlock has subscriptions, I could select popular setups, or build my own. And, what if I could select my settings in a dropdown when searching. So, maybe the people at HN setup a whitelist of 100 of the best sites for programming help. I add this list to my account. Now, anytime I want to search for a programming question, I type in the query, select my custom search type from the dropdown, 'programming questions', and then click search. I'll only get results from those 100 sites. Google will never implement this for a variety of reasons, so it's room for competition.

jessedhillon 13y ago
I am not 100% sure but I believe that Google has some of this ground covered. If I do a search for "Java" (for example, not sure this particular term will produce distinct results) while logged into my Google account, I will get different results than if my non-programming friends searched for "Java." Again, not totally certain that this is the case but I have seen some evidence before that search results are customized based on past behavior and other models of my preferences.
throwawaykf03 13y ago
Actually Google did implement something like this: you could "personalize" your search by moving results up and down the page. They discontinued it some time (just a few months?) later... I'm guessing because it created more noise than signal. This was some years ago.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  Yeah, it was SearchWiki, launched in 2008, discontinued sometime in early 2011 IIRC. About the only thing people used it for was to kill expertsexchange.com, and that problem took care of itself when StackOverflow got popular.

lelandriordan 13y ago

I have used Bing for years as my primary search engine simply because of Bing rewards. MS essentially pays me to do search (I get about $10 in Amazon gift cards a month from Bing Rewards Gold). At first I found myself first searching on Bing and then going back to Google. Over time however as I have made tens of thousands of searchs, Bing pretty much nails what I want everytime. It took like a year but the gap is pretty much closed. Now I feel like Google's are a little worse because they have way less data and Bing has way more.