Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by PhasmaFelis » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 11:00 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #104

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind you, it's overloaded now; double quotes also mean "this term must appear in the results." Used to be that prefixing with + meant that, but they killed that function so they could use it for Google Plus. You used to be able to search for, say, "annie oakley" "wild bill hickok" and find pages with either or both of those complete phrases; now there's no obvious way to do that. Many years ago, IIRC, Google Search a…

Probably because it produces confusing effects when people type in full sentences.

That wouldn't prevent them from denoting booleans with special characters (which they already do with other functions--see https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en), or having some kind of "advanced" interface. As far as I've been able to tell, boolean searches have been entirely removed from Google's public-facing search. There was no need to do that.

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

#122

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 11:09 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

IMO, $50/18mo. isn't worth taking a quality hit on anywhere near 10% (or even 1%) of my searches.

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

#123

Post by flukus » Wed, Jul 20, 2016, 11:51 PM UTC

PudgePacket wrote: post #85

thoman23 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course Google supports exact string matching. Just put your term in double quotes.

It feels like they haven't for a while, eg this http://i.imgur.com/zEDt5tD.png

It still prioritizes exact string matches I think.

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

#124

Post by SerLava » Sun, Jul 24, 2016, 1:07 AM UTC

graeme wrote: post #115

SerLava wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm understanding correctly, you're seeing a fake rank increase due to personalization. Bing figured out what you're looking for(your site), so it bumps it up the page. Try a device you haven't used yet? If not, it's hard to say why. There are a few factors. -Bing might have taken longer to crawl new content. -Bing seems to value exact keyword matches more than Google does. -Google likes to show multiple types of…

I searched in a private browser session. Just tried again with a VPN enabled. Broadly similar results. I might not have been searching for a broad enough range of stuff before, or maybe I only searched the newest pages.

Interesting - if that's your market then I would try this:

1. Make sure your keyword has a lot of search volume, at least on Google

2. Add that exact keyword string into a headline on the page, since Bing might not be smart enough to know what its searchers are intending.

3. If that doesn't work, just wait for Bing to "catch up" to Google for this type of search.

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

#125

Post by SerLava » Sun, Jul 24, 2016, 1:11 AM UTC

nhebb wrote: post #70

SerLava wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely. Bing has some unique technologies, but they can be partially characterized as being "Google 2 years ago" - in bad ways but also in good ways.

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

#126

Post by ci5er » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 6:35 PM UTC

lloeki wrote: post #94

nol13 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've really wanted to try Cortana since getting a Windows 10 laptop, but it won't let me turn it on without giving full access to search, email, credit card no, SSN, calendar, etc. Oh well. Why do I need to give it access to my search history and email to be able to find excel functions for me?

> it won't let me turn it on without giving full access to... Well it won't allow me to turn it on because I live in France and thus have a "french" MS/Live account but set my system language to English. Go figure†. † I can very well make up a zillion obscure and convoluted technical and/or legal reasons, but none make any sense from a end-user point of view, which is, in the end, what matters.

> which is, in the end, what matters

Not to the courts.