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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

#61
post #24

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 Go…

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

#63

I don't use Bing search, but I switched to Bing maps after Google's last set of changes rendered their map site effectively unusable. Bing maps has been.... really nice. I like it. It does what I want. I was not expecting that.

Hasn't the Bing map technology been recently sold out to Uber? It seems so.

http://www.recode.net/2015/6/29/11563964/microsoft-to-stop-c...

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

#64
post #63

I don't use Bing search, but I switched to Bing maps after Google's last set of changes rendered their map site effectively unusable. Bing maps has been.... really nice. I like it. It does what I want. I was not expecting that.

Hasn't the Bing map technology been recently sold out to Uber? It seems so. http://www.recode.net/2015/6/29/11563964/microsoft-to-stop-c...

Hadn't heard about that. Still works better than Google maps, though - not that I'm making much of a claim by saying so. I cannot imagine what the designers of the current Google maps site were thinking.

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

#65
post #63

I don't use Bing search, but I switched to Bing maps after Google's last set of changes rendered their map site effectively unusable. Bing maps has been.... really nice. I like it. It does what I want. I was not expecting that.

Hasn't the Bing map technology been recently sold out to Uber? It seems so. http://www.recode.net/2015/6/29/11563964/microsoft-to-stop-c...

> Microsoft already gets much of its map data from Nokia and other partners, but had been collecting its own aerial, 3-D and street-level maps. It will now source those images from partners as well, focusing its Bing Maps work on the user experience that overlays the map data and imagery.

Doesn't sound like it will affect the user experience much.

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

#66

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…

When we did user studies at Powerset, we did experiments where we put the Google name above search results from other engines and the Google was the strongest predictor. One test actually used a randomized ranking function on wikipedia search (so the algorithm recalled as well as google, but randomly ranked the results without any thought to relevance) vs Google, and we labeled the random data as Google and the Googl…

Is the Powerset technology still used somewhere for Bing? Bing used to be more intelligent right after the acquisition than today. Somehow it looks like they dropped the Powerset features after a few years. Also non EN-US Bing still looks and works like the old MSN search with a lot worse search results than Bing.com set to EN-US (Bing theme but old UX from MSN era and features frozen since MSN days).

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

#67
I use MS Edge as my browser. It has a little nifty feature where you highlight words and you can right click and do a "Bing lookup" and it opens a drawer on the right in the same window. It's really nice and doesn't break my workflow like the Chrome alternative which opens a new window.

I still use google for the most part, but I haven't found myself in a situation where I open the Bing drawer and say "Oh god, this is so bad, if only it searched Google instead". So I guess it's not that bad. Maybe I should try switching to Bing full time to see how it goes.

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

#68

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'm not knowledgeable about Bing, but Google doesn't support literal searches either if you mean that in the sense of exact string matching.

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

#69
post #25

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 irrelevan…

Do your websites show in the same rank in all three search engines? Do Bing and Yahoo need some specific SEO guidelines to be followed, perhaps? As usually SEO is mostly focused toward Google, perhaps they don't follow the same principles when ranking sites, thus you get less exposition and less visitors. I'm curious...

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

#70
post #58
post #5

I use Bing whenever I'm dissatisfied with Google's results. Bing has always returned worse results in this case. YMMV.

I do this too, especially when Google insists it knows my question better than I do. I'll actually Google the word "bing" in this case. It feels like a vote of no confidence. I would be absolutely shocked if Google's algorithm doesn't have a special alarm bell for "2 dozen search query redefinitions and then they typed fucking 'Bing' into me."

> I'll actually Google the word "bing" in this case.

That's funny. I'm going to start doing that.

I get frustrated w/ Google when I do a search and the top results do not have a single instance of one of my search terms on their pages. I have no idea why they'd do that. So I switch to Bing in those cases.

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