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Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore

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

#31

Post by Veedrac »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #20
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.

Can you give an example? I've posted about this before, here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11386924 Here's a snippet from that post: Nowadays, when I search for something like this: "search phrase one" "search phrase two" I will get a plethora of hits that omit one or the other of those words or phrases, starting with the very first page of results.

Search tools → All results → Verbatim

This prevents basically all of Google's word heuristics, like searching for related words or dropping parts of the search.

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

#32

Post by FireBeyond »

Steko wrote: post #7

I use DDG as my default at home, Google at work and Bing on my phone. My main complaint is the inability to restrict searches by date from their mobile version. As others mention the name is just godawful. Chanandlerbong.com would be an improvement.

I don't know that as someone who uses DuckDuckGo, you can really complain about Bing's name.

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

#33

Post by putlake »

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…

On my website yesterday there were 112,500 referrals from Google, 9,400 from Bing and 5,750 from Yahoo. Also, 800 from DDG and 200 from Baidu and 70 from Yandex.

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

#34

Post by dannylandau »

ac29 wrote: post #26

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.

By that measure, you earn about $2.7 a month, and that is sufficient for you to use Bing over Google!?

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

#36

Post by hugodahl »

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…

For #2,you can try them out head-to-head via BingItOn [0]. For a clean and fair benchmark, try it in a private/anonymous mode.

[0]: http://www.bingiton.com

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

#37

Post by c22 »

dexwiz wrote: post #18
louthy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not going to lie, I have seen people put Google into the Chrome omnibar, to then search something on Google. When I point the redundancy out to them, I am usually met with, 'Well that's just how I do it.' I bet there are more people doing that, and mistyping, than searching for a Haskell package.

I use a lot of devices, on some of them when I type my search into the address bar I get directed to something stupid like Yahoo. So now I've trained myself to always navigate to my desired search engine (usually Google) before performing my search. If it makes you feel better though, I do type out the "http://".

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

#38

Post by CamperBob2 »

dewiz wrote: post #22
paulddraper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's an uncapitalized recursive acronym ("Bing Is Not Google.")

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

#39

Post by PhantomGremlin »

Veedrac wrote: post #31
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? I've posted about this before, here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11386924 Here's a snippet from that post: Nowadays, when I search for something like this: "search phrase one" "search phrase two" I will get a plethora of hits that omit one or the other of those words or phrases, starting with the very first page of results.

Search tools → All results → Verbatim This prevents basically all of Google's word heuristics, like searching for related words or dropping parts of the search.

I didn't know that one, since I use Google search without JavaScript enabled.

Show me how to do that search qualification ahead of time, e.g. from the Firefox search box, and not as a post processing step after a search is completed. Or how to do that without JavaScript enabled. That kind of thing was easily possible before.

A long time ago I bought a book called Google Hacks[1]. It had all sorts of good tips on how to search better. E.g there were Perl and Python scripts to interface with Google. Now, running scripts like that will probably get your IP address banned (I don't know for sure, I haven't tried lately).

My point remains, Google used to be easy to use for advanced searches, without JavaScript. Not any more. There's a lot missing now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hacks

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

#40

Post by gottam »

dewiz wrote: post #21
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.

its better to have two major players then just one even bigger player.
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