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 to power users.
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://".
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.
Yes, "google" is a suggested search when you type "hoogle", but that seems only fair. After all, G and H are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure a typo for google swamps deliberate searches for hoogle (maybe even for me, but then I have a custom search keyword). They're also suggesting other Google services you might want (Translate, Maps and Drive, when I tried), not just the one you're already using.
More generally, I don't see how overly generic suggestions amount to dumbing-down Google Search. If I actually persist and search for "hoogle" (which I had to do anyway in the days before search suggestions) I get the Haskell results I want, even without any connection to my Google account.
PhantomGremlin may be referring to Google's personalized search results[0]. This can be turned off though, either through account settings or opening a private window, I think.
However, it seems you can't shut off location-based personalization, at least while logged out. For example, search "pizza" without quotes in a private window. In addition to showing you a map with nearby locations based on geolocation, the actual results will also include pizza places near your geolocation. I can imagine that there are probably scenarios where that kind of personalization might negatively affect someone searching for general information, although I can't think of any particular use cases off the top of my head.
I have noticed the geolocation search, ironically because it brings up the wrong results when I am on a vpn. If a search `weather`, I except local weather. But if I am on my work VPN, I get the weather for a few states away.
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.
I wasn't seeing that text because: Firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page. If I "allow" that redirection, then it shows what's in your image. And it properly refines the results without needing help from JavaScript.
Firefox is probably doing that because under Preferences -> Advanced I have checked the box: Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page. I just tried a virgin Firefox installation and that box is not checked by default. I don't know if it was the default in older versions, or if I flipped it myself.
One frequent one I ran across is that I'm searching for "one two three", where "three" is the highly specific term I'm after. Google will return the more frequently searched "one two" results.
Another is the date control, google thinks older is better but it very often isn't.
The date options suck too. Last week is usually zero hits, last month maybe one unrelated one, but then last year returns far too many. What I really want is to add a weighting so that newer stuff has higher priority.
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 Google result as Yahoo!. Testing told us the garbage data with the G over it was better.
I dunno what you wanna do with that data. Maybe some soul searching? Funny story, though.
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).
Without disclosing things I shouldn't disclose (professionally if not legally), a lot of the acqusition was acquihire and then went on to cognitive services.
A lot of what the powersetters did was bring their expertise in indexing in. The Powerset indexing requirements were fairly intense, so bing getting those was a big leg up over the previous (good, but somewhat less informed) work.
A lot of the stuff we had at Powerset as custom services is now in Google and MS cognitive services. It's so cool to have access to those tools again. Luis.ai is really really fun to use lately.
In my experience, Bing is substantially better than Google for certain use cases.
Google tends to be better for things I'm looking for very specifically, unless those things are likely to match DMCA takedown search terms (where there are DMCA notices at the bottom of results pages).
Bing tends to be better for things that are vaguely like what I'm searching for, and for specifics if they're likely to match DMCA takedown search terms.
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 interested in hearing how those numbers compare to other sites.
I know google models how often pages change so that googlebot's time is spent efficiently. Maybe bing expects more changes, or they think more checks result in better query results.
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 irrelevant as a source of traffic. Even though I'd prefer to see some competition for Google, there just isn't any. DuckDuckGo referred me just 32 visitors yesterday, so they have even further to go!
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...
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.
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.
I moved to Bing a couple of months back and I do the opposite, i.e. turn to Google when I can't find what I'm looking for in Bing. On avg I'd say it's ~5% of the times for generic searches, ~10% for more technical stuff. Used to be much worse, and I disliked the UI very much while now I think it's on par with Google (both G and B have their pros/cons).
I kind of like that they finally added News (I was using Google a lot as a newspaper) and that you can switch tabs and use it as a portal, while Google doesn't show any content until you start searching for something, which I'm not saying it's wrong, but sometimes I start browsing directly from Bing homepage if I like what it's suggesting, which never happens with Google.
One thing they need to fix is the mobile app on Android though, because it's unusable, it keeps crashing and I've almost given up there.
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.
Bingo - but seriously, I tried this too, I now use DDG, then Google and if I can't find what I'm looking for on either I tweet about it or write a blog post.
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 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?
It is definitely implemented differently than that. Yahoo has plenty of search engine knowledge and technology. There is surely some sort of process that inlines and caches any sort of query and result in Yahoo's backend. It's also fairly likely that they are using their own backend still for index storage and delivery, and they have some formal method of syncing the index from bing fairly regularly -- or even on demand for more long tail searches.
In other words, the most likely case where "double indirection" occurs is in very long tail searches that Yahoo has not seen recently.
Yahoo "had" plenty of own expertise - they created Hadoop afterall and used it for their own search engine. Until they closed it around 2010 for a deal with Microsoft Bing.
If Yahoo hosts the BOSS API on their servers or in on Microsoft servers as part of their deal, isn't known. As DDG recently started to provide the search results from a Yahoo sub-domain (and from Yahoo (or Microsoft?) data centers) to minimize the huge latency (that everyone hates) a little bit.
"To get access to the most relevant Yahoo technology, due to contractual obligations that call has to be associated with a Yahoo domain, in this case, duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net." Of course they mention only the first part, as Yahoo itself relies on the Microsoft contract to access Bing search directly.
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 also supported boolean AND/OR, but that was also removed, for no obvious reason.
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.
People have had this misconception for a long time about Google, I remember having this debate on HN 4 or 5 years ago. I'm not sure Google has ever supported truly exact string matching.
As mentioned in the article, and I recall from when I was more heavily invested in the stock market, Bing cost Microsoft billions of dollars every year in lost revenue. We all knew that. But this article goes on to say that it's hard to figure how much Bing brings in and they are only going by what Microsoft says and Microsoft says it's "profitable".
Well, profitable could mean by a dollar, and I don't see any shouting from the rooftops by Microsoft. I also don't see, as someone else brings up, much in the way of their presence in my server logs either.
What really gets me are all the articles that appear on MSN but really turn out to be searches with Bing. Don't know if they still do that. I don't use MSN either.
I'm interested in the stuffs behind Bing rather than the search part. Deep learning, AI, translations, cognitive, etc. I hope Microsoft open up more of their Bing apis.
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 Google when I search from my devices.
I can't account for this. Just a week ago (before writing this post) I was ranking much worse, when searching from my devices. But I checked my logs, and I've had no surge in Bing related traffic. So the issue was specific to me?
Would still be very interested in a Bing technical SEO guide, as it would help me troubleshoot cases like that.
Also, I can add that my Bing + Yahoo + DDG traffic is about 3% of the total volume of Google searches. My demographic is young, college educated people who are applying to law school.
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 content if a query's intent is ambiguous. Bing tends not to do this.
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.
Again, the vast majority of the time, the Bing results are fine. I think I waste maybe 10 seconds a day re-searching things. ~$0.10 for ~10 seconds (approx $360/hour) is more than my job pays.
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.
I know it was a joke, but there actually is something to it.
I started using Bing for the rewards program. I would probably use it even without the rewards program, now. The results are approximately as good as Google - when I can't find something and I go to Google, 95% of the time Google isn't giving me good results either. There are some nice little features and I like the look and layout, but fundamentally what really sold it was the rewards program, which I've been turning into Amazon gift cards and using to fill my bookshelves.
But every time someone sees me use Bing, or I mention that I use Bing, there's very often some judgement there. Like it or not, people, even people on HN, judge you by the tools you use. The social aspect matters: Google and Apple produce excellent technical products, but they're so popular in part because of social effects. No surprise; humans are fundamentally social animals, none of us are beyond fashion.
> 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.
I recently wasn't able to find an image on Google Image Search and tried Bing, and to my surprise, found the image in question. Still use Google, but I know that Bing is a good back up option.
1) I always recommend to my friends to give Cortana more than a 5 second consideration - especially if they're Windows users. Since Cortana primarily uses Bing, there's always a hesitation - but it's surprisingly fun and an effective AI "assistant." I'm still working on understanding the Office 365 capabilities, as I discover some cool ones here and there
Example that blew away a colleague at work using a Surface Pro: "Cortana - I'm trying to find an Excel function to do X & Y. What should I use?" Not only did Bing find a serviceable answer, but because we made the search while Excel was opened, the function was auto-populated in the highlighted cell.
2) Some of the Bing/Cortana cognitive intelligence APIs are pretty cool and pretty available to anyone. As an example, I was hacking at a chat bot for Skype + Slack for fun one weekend, and I noticed that there was a tool that could take an image, and provide a description of what was in the image. If it was of a baseball player, the level of detail would be down to the color of her/his shirt.
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?
Why do I need to give it access to my search history and email to be able to find excel functions for me?
You should think of your personal data as a valuable asset that you can use to pay for things. Now you know why you need to give Cortana access to them.
In the situation where you're using Cortana to search your meetings you have to give it permission to access your data for two reasons - to tell it that you agree to allow it to access the information and to pay the price of using the service by giving it access to your data. The 'payment' issue is still there.
> 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.
"but because we made the search while Excel was opened, the function was auto-populated in the highlighted cell." - which version of Excel was this? The desktop version (2010, 2013, 2016?) or the XAML version? I'd be surprised if Cortana integrated with the desktop version, considering Office doesn't run in Windows 10's sandbox model, and Microsoft is only allowing sandboxed apps access to the cooler features of Win10.
First, classic Win32 apps ("desktop versions") have had access to a subset of useful WinRT components (WinRT the COM replacement, not WinRT the OS SKU) since early in Windows 8's history. (8.1 and 10 both opened up further the WinRT APIs that Win32 apps can consume.) A lot of the APIs only make sense inside the "sandbox" as you refer to it, but it's not locked down quite as much as you think it is. [Then there's the recently built Project Centennial bridge to give Win32 apps even greater access to WinRT APIs and the ability to spin up modern user interfaces in a mixed-interop model and ease transitions between the two types of apps.]
Second, that doesn't actually matter in this case anyway (and is a red herring) because it is Cortana automating Office and not the other way around. Win32 automation is relatively straight forward, including the most basic automation of them all: cut, copy, and paste. It could be Cortana is calling into COM components in Office or even older, more generic Windows Automation COM components. (Which can still be done, with permissions, from "inside the sandbox". Again the "sandbox" is not as locked down as a lot of people seem to think it is, especially in Windows 10.)
I wouldn't mind so much, but a lot of shareware programs want to change my default search engine into Bing or Yahoo. Also they want to install toolbars as well.
So I use Linux Mint to avoid that bother, after an Adobe PDF Reader installed a free version of McAfee and i think changed my search engine in Windows 10 because I forgot to do a custom install and tell it not to or whatever.
Firefox changed from Google to Yahoo, and Chrome uses Google and I use more than one web browser to test out webpages and site designs and other stuff. I preview any web app I am designing in different web browsers to see if I need to change HTML or CSS or whatever to make it look better, even how it looks on Mobile devices.
I sort of want my web search to come from Google, I put Adsense on my website and Youtube page. I want to see how SEO works in Google for my Adsense pages.
I admit that Bing has improved over the years, but it is not enough to convince me to switch from Google to Bing just yet. I get more referrals from Google for some reason than I do from Yahoo or Bing.
The amusing thing is that when Bing had its own CEO and its own dev team, it didn't do well. When it was turned into just another Microsoft product, with different parts of it (operations, servers, look and feel, ad sales) handled by the Microsoft organizations that do those for other products, it did better.
Maybe Microsoft has the big multi-product company thing figured out.
I think a lot of it is due to Windows 10. If you get upgraded from Windows 7/8, you always start with Edge as your new default browser and Bing as search engine for both browser and Cortana. Most people probably haven't switched back.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
one of my issues with bing is that its primarily targeted to US. most of the cool features are not available internationally. on the other hand google seems to have localized content everywhere (even though Google Now is again not available in my country)
Terrible comparison. Some people genuinely prefer Pepsi. I can't see anyone genuinely preferring Bing when it's not the default search engine on their tool that they don't know how to/care to change.
Slightly off topic, but I actually prefer Pepsi. I started drinking Pepsi rather than Coke because it's cheaper, not that I ever really disliked Pepsi, but now I find I actually like Pepsi better.
So really it's just conditioning whether people prefer Pepsi or Coke.
I am willing to bet that Bing revenue is mainly from packaged sales that MS does to its corporate clients where they bundle all their products. Other than that, I do so see any logic is paying bing to advertise your product.
Deal breaker for me is Bing's lack of date filter.
I use this most of the time on Google.
I read somewhere they added this about a year ago, still missing for me, maybe just a US feature.
I still hate Google's so called mobile friendly results on iPad safari, so I have to use iCab browser even though it's slower, so I would try Bing if they added date filter.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 82.8 ms ] thread1) 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 to power users.
tbf, I don't feel the same way as the GP. But this search always struck me as crazy in the past.
Yes, "google" is a suggested search when you type "hoogle", but that seems only fair. After all, G and H are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure a typo for google swamps deliberate searches for hoogle (maybe even for me, but then I have a custom search keyword). They're also suggesting other Google services you might want (Translate, Maps and Drive, when I tried), not just the one you're already using.
More generally, I don't see how overly generic suggestions amount to dumbing-down Google Search. If I actually persist and search for "hoogle" (which I had to do anyway in the days before search suggestions) I get the Haskell results I want, even without any connection to my Google account.
I wonder if the increased search volume over the past hour since you posted this updated the probability that it was a mistyping?
It wouldn't surprise me - unique vocabulary (think hashtags) created all the time, and Google is pretty good at responding to that.
However, it seems you can't shut off location-based personalization, at least while logged out. For example, search "pizza" without quotes in a private window. In addition to showing you a map with nearby locations based on geolocation, the actual results will also include pizza places near your geolocation. I can imagine that there are probably scenarios where that kind of personalization might negatively affect someone searching for general information, although I can't think of any particular use cases off the top of my head.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Personalized_Search
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:
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.This prevents basically all of Google's word heuristics, like searching for related words or dropping parts of the search.
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
Add this as a search provider:
http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...
The '&tbs=li' paramater is the magic flag, for 'literal'
I just tried Google with JS disabled. It's right at the side:
http://i.imgur.com/WB4HH58.png
I wasn't seeing that text because: Firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page. If I "allow" that redirection, then it shows what's in your image. And it properly refines the results without needing help from JavaScript.
Firefox is probably doing that because under Preferences -> Advanced I have checked the box: Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page. I just tried a virgin Firefox installation and that box is not checked by default. I don't know if it was the default in older versions, or if I flipped it myself.
Another is the date control, google thinks older is better but it very often isn't.
The date options suck too. Last week is usually zero hits, last month maybe one unrelated one, but then last year returns far too many. What I really want is to add a weighting so that newer stuff has higher priority.
[0]: http://www.bingiton.com
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 Google result as Yahoo!. Testing told us the garbage data with the G over it was better.
I dunno what you wanna do with that data. Maybe some soul searching? Funny story, though.
A lot of what the powersetters did was bring their expertise in indexing in. The Powerset indexing requirements were fairly intense, so bing getting those was a big leg up over the previous (good, but somewhat less informed) work.
A lot of the stuff we had at Powerset as custom services is now in Google and MS cognitive services. It's so cool to have access to those tools again. Luis.ai is really really fun to use lately.
Google tends to be better for things I'm looking for very specifically, unless those things are likely to match DMCA takedown search terms (where there are DMCA notices at the bottom of results pages).
Bing tends to be better for things that are vaguely like what I'm searching for, and for specifics if they're likely to match DMCA takedown search terms.
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 interested in hearing how those numbers compare to other sites.
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 irrelevant as a source of traffic. Even though I'd prefer to see some competition for Google, there just isn't any. DuckDuckGo referred me just 32 visitors yesterday, so they have even further to go!
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.
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."
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.
As others mention the name is just godawful. Chanandlerbong.com would be an improvement.
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.
In other words, the most likely case where "double indirection" occurs is in very long tail searches that Yahoo has not seen recently.
DuckDuckGo uses Yahoo BOSS search API (closed down for everyone but DDG nowadays) which relies on the Bing search engine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_BOSS
If Yahoo hosts the BOSS API on their servers or in on Microsoft servers as part of their deal, isn't known. As DDG recently started to provide the search results from a Yahoo sub-domain (and from Yahoo (or Microsoft?) data centers) to minimize the huge latency (that everyone hates) a little bit.
"To get access to the most relevant Yahoo technology, due to contractual obligations that call has to be associated with a Yahoo domain, in this case, duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net." Of course they mention only the first part, as Yahoo itself relies on the Microsoft contract to access Bing search directly.
See: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
Many years ago, IIRC, Google Search also supported boolean AND/OR, but that was also removed, for no obvious reason.
If you want it as a default, add it to your browser as a search engine plugin: http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...
Or: Search tools → All results → Verbatim
To the poster below, putting the query in double quotes definitely does not do exact string matching.
Edit: verbatim not verbose
Well, profitable could mean by a dollar, and I don't see any shouting from the rooftops by Microsoft. I also don't see, as someone else brings up, much in the way of their presence in my server logs either.
What really gets me are all the articles that appear on MSN but really turn out to be searches with Bing. Don't know if they still do that. I don't use MSN either.
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 Google when I search from my devices.
I can't account for this. Just a week ago (before writing this post) I was ranking much worse, when searching from my devices. But I checked my logs, and I've had no surge in Bing related traffic. So the issue was specific to me?
Would still be very interested in a Bing technical SEO guide, as it would help me troubleshoot cases like that.
Also, I can add that my Bing + Yahoo + DDG traffic is about 3% of the total volume of Google searches. My demographic is young, college educated people who are applying to law school.
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 content if a query's intent is ambiguous. Bing tends not to do this.
I might not have been searching for a broad enough range of stuff before, or maybe I only searched the newest pages.
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.
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.
I started using Bing for the rewards program. I would probably use it even without the rewards program, now. The results are approximately as good as Google - when I can't find something and I go to Google, 95% of the time Google isn't giving me good results either. There are some nice little features and I like the look and layout, but fundamentally what really sold it was the rewards program, which I've been turning into Amazon gift cards and using to fill my bookshelves.
But every time someone sees me use Bing, or I mention that I use Bing, there's very often some judgement there. Like it or not, people, even people on HN, judge you by the tools you use. The social aspect matters: Google and Apple produce excellent technical products, but they're so popular in part because of social effects. No surprise; humans are fundamentally social animals, none of us are beyond fashion.
IMO, $50/18mo. isn't worth taking a quality hit on anywhere near 10% (or even 1%) of my searches.
Example that blew away a colleague at work using a Surface Pro: "Cortana - I'm trying to find an Excel function to do X & Y. What should I use?" Not only did Bing find a serviceable answer, but because we made the search while Excel was opened, the function was auto-populated in the highlighted cell.
2) Some of the Bing/Cortana cognitive intelligence APIs are pretty cool and pretty available to anyone. As an example, I was hacking at a chat bot for Skype + Slack for fun one weekend, and I noticed that there was a tool that could take an image, and provide a description of what was in the image. If it was of a baseball player, the level of detail would be down to the color of her/his shirt.
Why do I need to give it access to my search history and email to be able to find excel functions for me?
You should think of your personal data as a valuable asset that you can use to pay for things. Now you know why you need to give Cortana access to them.
Do you think this is the sole reason behind that?
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.
Not to the courts.
I'd be curious to see XAML adoption with respect to usage.
Second, that doesn't actually matter in this case anyway (and is a red herring) because it is Cortana automating Office and not the other way around. Win32 automation is relatively straight forward, including the most basic automation of them all: cut, copy, and paste. It could be Cortana is calling into COM components in Office or even older, more generic Windows Automation COM components. (Which can still be done, with permissions, from "inside the sandbox". Again the "sandbox" is not as locked down as a lot of people seem to think it is, especially in Windows 10.)
So I use Linux Mint to avoid that bother, after an Adobe PDF Reader installed a free version of McAfee and i think changed my search engine in Windows 10 because I forgot to do a custom install and tell it not to or whatever.
Firefox changed from Google to Yahoo, and Chrome uses Google and I use more than one web browser to test out webpages and site designs and other stuff. I preview any web app I am designing in different web browsers to see if I need to change HTML or CSS or whatever to make it look better, even how it looks on Mobile devices.
I sort of want my web search to come from Google, I put Adsense on my website and Youtube page. I want to see how SEO works in Google for my Adsense pages.
I admit that Bing has improved over the years, but it is not enough to convince me to switch from Google to Bing just yet. I get more referrals from Google for some reason than I do from Yahoo or Bing.
Maybe Microsoft has the big multi-product company thing figured out.
http://www.recode.net/2015/6/29/11563964/microsoft-to-stop-c...
Doesn't sound like it will affect the user experience much.
I'm also a bit surprise that Bing video search is no longer available, at least not in Denmark.
Bing video search is available for me in New Zealand, interesting that it doesn't work for you in Denmark.
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.
So really it's just conditioning whether people prefer Pepsi or Coke.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-22/google-and...