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Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

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Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#31

Post by cdesmar »

bartl wrote: post #23
tocomment wrote: post #19

Bing is dead?

Well, according to this post, everyone who was technically knowledgeable about Bing has left. That implies that there will no longer be any relevant technical progress, any more.

Not sure this is relevant progress but 18 march bing for "HG download" gave no mercurial results (hg was assumed to be a mistyping of HD), by 24 march it was giving all mercurial results. I twittered about both.

That is at least anecdotal evidence that things are progressing in some way or another.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#32

Post by GFischer »

Ruudjah wrote: post #14
raganwald wrote: post #12

Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel. After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between proces…

It's one of those very, very scarce texts where mild swearing adds something. 99 out of 100 times, it's just deteriorating the post quality and signs of bad writership.

Indeed. Saying "Michael fucking Burrows" made me look him up (as intended, I guess :) )

"Michael Burrows (born circa 1963) is widely known as the creator of the Burrows/Wheeler transform. He also was, with Louis Monier, one of the two main creators of AltaVista" (which I guess was the point!). He ironically now works to Google according to Wikipedia.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#33

Post by sunchild »

raganwald wrote: post #12

Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel. After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between proces…

I'm highly tolerant of spelling/grammar errors, normally. Who cares about "it's" vs. "its" in this context, right? But in this case, I needed to re-read every sentence. Even after re-reading it a few times, I had to guess the author's intended meaning. That is just a failure to communicate.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#34

Post by cicero »

mattmanser wrote: post #17

The whole article seems to be back to front. As far as I knew Live search was essentially failing then they made it Bing and it's started to succeed. Am I missing something here or what? I'm no expert on the history but it seems to me that the opposite of what the author is saying actually happened!

You have an outsider perspective, while the article was written from an insider's perspective. It appears that the technology team was at its peak when it changed from Live to Bing, and has declined since then. The success of Bing has been due to marketing, but without a sound technical team behind it, it's going to die.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#35

Post by dhimes »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #29
kami8845 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing that out, as others have written below, I'm a new user and while the system here looks pretty similiar to the one at Reddit, the type of comment that is appreciated here seems vastly different. I was kind of surprised to instantly receive 3 downvotes for my first comment that just expressed my happiness to have found this community, and while it was pretty void of content, the rules expressly stat…

>I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment Personally I'd say that depends. If you have a positive comment history then no you sholdn't be banned for a small run of comments that the community finds unhelpful to the conversation. If all of your first comments are downvoted then I suggest you make a new account and wait until you have something positive to say. Note that positive does…

Part of the problem is that downvoting is used to express disagreement. We have this discussion often on HN (perhaps too often): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Note: the following unexpectedly turned into a bit of a rant, with a dose of whining thrown in:

Many of us "old-timers" think that downvoting without giving a reason is mostly bad form (the exception is for a rude or obnoxious comment). I've personally noticed an increase in this behavior.

I believe that doing so decreases the user experience. I've had plenty of disagreements over the years and have almost always learned something from them (even if it just required me to do a bit of soul-searching). Posts would be painstakingly composed (one of the big complaints we had was that the post-page timed out while we were composing- so we had to result in using a separate editor to compose, then click "reply" and copy-and-paste.

But now-- why bother? I've been around a while. I'm on my second (third?) career. Not a hacker extraordinaire by any means, but I'm well educated technically and have maintained my involvement with a broad array of interests (I like to learn new things). I've seen some things, and I'm willing to share- and even be challenged in my own conclusions about them.

But when I make a post that the "average HN-er" (age 25, so I hear) may not think is very smart and I immediately get downvoted with no reason given, it sends a signal that HN has changed in a very dramatic way.

The site is far less valuable than it used to be.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#36

Post by danvet »

fferen wrote: post #28

For all the people saying X search engine is better, here's a tool to compare Google and Bing (and Yahoo) results without bias. It simply shows you three columns of results, you click on the one with the best results, and it reveals which ones came from which search engines. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ Note: I am not affiliated with this site in any way.

I've seen this site before and frankly I think it's rather irrelevant. Recent innovations (past years) in search are mostly spelling corrections/related topics suggestions, visual presentation of aggregated results (how many images, results from suggestions) and stuff like that. The pure ranking order delivered on a fixed search is more and more useless, the imo important part is how the search engine guides you until you've found the correct search query that delivers what you're actually looking for.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#37

Post by GFischer »

fferen wrote: post #28

For all the people saying X search engine is better, here's a tool to compare Google and Bing (and Yahoo) results without bias. It simply shows you three columns of results, you click on the one with the best results, and it reveals which ones came from which search engines. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ Note: I am not affiliated with this site in any way.

Hmmm, it's giving me the wrong results... it shows the results I voted from are from "Bing", but when I went to Google it showed me those results, and Bing's results where the ones marked "Yahoo".

See here

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&...

it would have me believe that Bing's were the better results (they weren't for this particular search).

Also, when I'm logged in and using my country-specific search, Google is way, way, way better than the competition.

Edit: I'll probably message the creator (parent is not affiliated with the site)

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#39

Post by pohl »

jules wrote: post #13
gjm11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder whether it's an automatic consequence of having substantial negative karma. (I'm ambivalent about the stealth-blacklisting thing. It's probably the right thing to do with genuinely abusive users. It might be the right thing with people genuinely incapable of contributing much. But I've seen too many cases where someone's comments are all being auto-deaded -- invisibly to them, AIUI -- with no obvious reason…

Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before…

Just for counterpoint: it would be easy for new users to figure out what a good post is by reading and paying attention to the scores they get. One gets a sense for what makes one a -4, another a mere zero, or some other a +47.

Re: Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

#40

Post by ozziegooen »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #24
raganwald wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the weight of their "architecture." The result is s…

Middle managers are rewarded for making budget and meeting release dates. Seems good, right? So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So that success is assured and their metric is optimized. Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does this happen? {opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial goals) or top management (company…

Peter Drucker has claimed the lack of Middle Managers to be responsible for the early declines of Ford and Edison Electric Company. Their presence itself isn't a failure, it's their role and management.
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