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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 a

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.

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.