Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 126 posts

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#21

Post by dewiz »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #2

At the moment I don't use Bing for two reasons: 1) it's Microsoft 2) it's not better than Google I'd gladly use it more if they would fix #2. Google has gotten horribly bad about not searching for what I ask it for. It's been castrated. It insists on returning what it thinks I want, not what I asked for. I know that for 99% of the people that's the right thing to do, but I really hate that Google has given the shaft…

my 2 cents, #1 doesn't make any sense these days. You can find something bad in all the major players.

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#22

Post by dewiz »

paulddraper wrote: post #15
sixothree wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use it because I am turned off by the name, strange I know. It's a hard word to speak and it is a meaningless word.

Which? Google or Bing?

I'm curious too. Google is perhaps the oddest of the 2 words, but the article is about Bing, which is hardly a difficult word...

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#24

Post by graeme »

Anyone have a reference for Bing specific SEO? I mean, in the technical sense.

I've noticed my site ranks significantly worse in Bing/DDG than on Google. All I've done for Google is on page SEO, nothing fancy or Google specific.

I'm wondering if I've set something up incorrectly that I could fix via Bing Webmaster tools or some other method.

Update:

Apparently, this is not so. I now rank the same in DDG/Bing as in Google when I search from my devices.

I can't account for this. Just a week ago (before writing this post) I was ranking much worse, when searching from my devices. But I checked my logs, and I've had no surge in Bing related traffic. So the issue was specific to me?

Would still be very interested in a Bing technical SEO guide, as it would help me troubleshoot cases like that.

Also, I can add that my Bing + Yahoo + DDG traffic is about 3% of the total volume of Google searches. My demographic is young, college educated people who are applying to law school.

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#25

Post by emilyfm »

blakesterz wrote: post #4

What numbers matter here? Usage? Traffic? Referrals? This article makes it seem like revenue? Just for the heck of it I just grepped the log on my one server. It's got about 200 different domains, mostly smaller sites. About 600k hits today. ~5,000 referrals from Google, ~200 from Bing. Strangely enough there seems to be about 11,000 hits from Bingbot and only about half that from Googlebot crawlers. I'd be intereste…

One of my sites yesterday had about 64,000 referrals from Google, and just over a thousand each from Bing and Yahoo (and just under a thousand from Baidu).

Google has indexed more than 50 times as many pages as Bing on that site, and crawls far more aggressively (over a million pages per day), which will both be factors, but the main one is probably still that Bing has less visitors.

So for me Bing is still irrelevant as a source of traffic. Even though I'd prefer to see some competition for Google, there just isn't any. DuckDuckGo referred me just 32 visitors yesterday, so they have even further to go!

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#26

Post by ac29 »

I wonder how much of it is due to their rewards program.

Shameful admission: Bing is my primary search engine, since they pay me (approx $50 over the past 18 months). 90+% of the time the search results are as good as Google, and re-searching when it isnt takes a few seconds.

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#27

Post by School-Cotton »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #2

At the moment I don't use Bing for two reasons: 1) it's Microsoft 2) it's not better than Google I'd gladly use it more if they would fix #2. Google has gotten horribly bad about not searching for what I ask it for. It's been castrated. It insists on returning what it thinks I want, not what I asked for. I know that for 99% of the people that's the right thing to do, but I really hate that Google has given the shaft…

So make your own search engine. Google is a business, not your personal valet. Of course it is going to do what makes sense to the 99% of people.

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#28

Post by fpgeek »

louthy wrote: post #8
dexwiz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? Sometimes it cannot find what I am searching for, but I have never thought it was intentional.

Try searching for 'hoogle'. What I want is this: https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/ - not the website I am already on typing a search query in to! tbf, I don't feel the same way as the GP. But this search always struck me as crazy in the past.

I just tried this in a private window.

Yes, "google" is a suggested search when you type "hoogle", but that seems only fair. After all, G and H are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure a typo for google swamps deliberate searches for hoogle (maybe even for me, but then I have a custom search keyword). They're also suggesting other Google services you might want (Translate, Maps and Drive, when I tried), not just the one you're already using.

More generally, I don't see how overly generic suggestions amount to dumbing-down Google Search. If I actually persist and search for "hoogle" (which I had to do anyway in the days before search suggestions) I get the Haskell results I want, even without any connection to my Google account.

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#29

Post by nl »

louthy wrote: post #8
dexwiz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? Sometimes it cannot find what I am searching for, but I have never thought it was intentional.

Try searching for 'hoogle'. What I want is this: https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/ - not the website I am already on typing a search query in to! tbf, I don't feel the same way as the GP. But this search always struck me as crazy in the past.

It's the first result for me. It does have a "did you mean 'google'".

I wonder if the increased search volume over the past hour since you posted this updated the probability that it was a mistyping?

It wouldn't surprise me - unique vocabulary (think hashtags) created all the time, and Google is pretty good at responding to that.

Re: Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

#30

Post by winteriscoming »

izendejas wrote: post #9

Bing does not support literal searches. This is a dealbreaker for me, particularly since their language models aren't very precise if at all employed. I believe this is why many developers will find Google is a lot better. A lot of our searches are very specific error messages, for example.

I haven't used Bing and I mostly use Duckduckgo and Google. It's really surprising to hear that Bing doesn't support literal searches. Genuine question - for a search engine, aren't literal searches much more easier to implement?
Post reply on HN