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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

#81

Post by techolic »

SerLava wrote: post #58
jkmcf wrote: 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."

This actually sounds like the easier way to tell Google about the dissatisfaction, in full context.

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

#82

Post by kasparsklavins »

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'm one of those people that types "youtube" into the omnibar and then click the first result. Typing the extra .com at the end is too much of a hassle when auto complete fails me.

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

#83

Post by onion2k »

kyriakos wrote: post #77
onion2k wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you factor in the cost to your reputation when people see you using Bing?

I assumed HN community was beyond fashion and opinions like this.

It was meant as a joke, but your reply is interesting. Why would you assume that the HN community is "beyond fashion" and particular opinions? We're human beings. We have flaws and biases that lead us to make irrational decisions. Some of the things that HN users do are hugely driven by fashion (in the sense of following ideas before they're proven) rather than empirical evidence - entrepreneurship has fads (lean startup, startup canvas, social businesses, moonshots, etc), software development flits from one methodology to another (agile dev, functional dev, etc). They're fashions that are trying to improve things rather than merely looking different, but that doesn't mean they're not fashionable.

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

#84

Post by Razengan »

kyriakos wrote: post #77
onion2k wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you factor in the cost to your reputation when people see you using Bing?

I assumed HN community was beyond fashion and opinions like this.

I assume it was a joke. There are definitely things though, that would sully your reputation in any community; for example, using Comic Sans.

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

#85

Post by PudgePacket »

thoman23 wrote: post #73
lmmlzxx wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#86

Post by emilyfm »

arien wrote: post #69
emilyfm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The ranks for the main search terms are similar.

Although my site is in English, over 50% of visitors are from outside the US. Bing doesn't really have the global reach of Google.

For example I get 250 times as much traffic from India with Google rather than Bing, 1000 times as much in Indonesia. Compared to 36 times as much in the US (which is much closer to the ratio of the other sites, which may be more US-focused).

It's probably a bit harsh to call Bing a "local US search engine" (like Baidu and Yandex in their countries), but it certainly needs to get more market share in other countries to compete globally.

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

#87

Post by 2bitencryption »

frik wrote: post #59
winteriscoming wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Btw DuckDuckGo is based on Yahoo search which itself is based on Bing. I tried DDG but I cannot live with its high response time (obviously can't be improve due two times indirection) and the Bing results are worse.

are you suggesting that DDG makes a call to Yahoo which then makes a call to Bing ("two times indirection")? Surely it's implemented differently than that, right?

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

#88

Post by mrweasel »

marssaxman wrote: post #62

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.

Bing maps is a great service, but you have to know it's there to use it. There's no link to the maps service on the Bing front page or the search result page. You need to know the URL. bing.com/maps is pretty easy to guess, but why hide it?

I'm also a bit surprise that Bing video search is no longer available, at least not in Denmark.

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

#89

Post by nazgob »

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.

Yes but they have a great history and experience in that matter ;)
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