

Microsoft says : "Bing is now as good as Google" - aritraghosh007
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/03/microsoft-bing-v-google/

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johnfn
I don't believe that it is.

I feel like search queries can be divided broadly into two categories: general
and specific. General queries are things like "what is python" or "java
tutorial". These are subjects that are well known and have a lot of relevant
information on the web. Specific queries are queries things that you and maybe
a few hundred people in the world have ever encountered. Think: really
esoteric programming erors.

What I believe - and I don't have any hard facts to back it up past my own
experience, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt - is that Bing
excels in the first category but not the second.

The other day I was doing some schoolwork involving SSL, where I had to write
a man in the middle proxy. I ran into this really bizarre error message:
"valid not before not set." I had no idea what it meant, and since I was using
a proxy SSL server for the assignment I ended up using bing to search for it -
no results. Google has exactly 1 result for that phrase, but it's the one that
you need to get back on track.

This happened often throughout the project. Bing gives pretty good results; I
certainly don't wish to disparage the website. But whenever I started running
into really esoteric or weird bugs, Google turned up the right page time and
time again. Bing felt like it was taking a hazy guess at the right answer.

These are the specific queries, and this is where Google stays ahead. I've
used Bing in the past for a month or two; I've also used duckduckgo. Both are
very good. I certainly don't consider myself anything of a google fanboy, for
that matter. But when it comes to specific queries, I still can't find a
search engine that holds a candle to Google.

~~~
bstar77
I've been trying duckduckgo for a month now and I'm definitely not getting as
good results for my "esoteric programming errors" as I hoped I would. I'm also
shocked at how much I used google image search, losing that has been a shock.

Now I switched away from Google due to privacy issues so Bing does nothing to
improve that. I have a little more faith in Duckduckgo, but it is definitely
lagging on features and relevance for me so I don't know how long it's going
to be my default search.

~~~
joedevon
What's great w/ DDG is if you want a google image search, you append !gi bing
images !bi and !g for redirecting to Google !b for bing. !m for google maps.
So basically you give a small guy a chance and it's decent enough. When it
isn't the shortcut is great for the big boys.

And for programming, Duck Duck Go is the best because you append !so and it
takes you to stackoverflow. Google values SO scrapers higher than SO.

That said, if you don't learn the shortcuts, you are missing out.

Also, after listening to a talk by Stoyan Stefanov (it's on IT Conversations)
I realized that what makes Google so useful subconsciously is their subsecond
response time. This is my biggest problem w/ ddg.

That said, I went to a meetup tonight by an Xoogler. He was mentioning that
they have an internal query tool that will query a trillion records in a
second. I wonder if Bing has the same...

~~~
jrockway
_Google values SO scrapers higher than SO._

Wasn't this fixed years ago? I haven't seen SO scrapers in ages, and I get a
lot of SO results from both my personal and work Google accounts. (I
definitely blocked them from my personal account ages ago, but I've never
blocked anything from my work account.)

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scarmig
I find it just as good, actually.

There's always the point, though, that you can't be "just as good as" an
entrenched player to win. You've got to change the entire nature of the
playing field.

So long as MS doesn't do that, it's "lost" (for certain definitions of lost
that include making hundreds of millions of dollars).

~~~
marshray
The article was about how the companies (and people) behind it go about
developing search engine technology. It barely mentions market share.

There's probably interesting things to say about it if we can avoid the rut of
the old familiar "which of /Google|Microsoft|Apple|Facebook/ will winner-take-
all in the market battle with for /Search|Advertising|Desktop|Mobile|Social/"
discussion.

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edwardy20
Everyone who says Bing is better or Google is better should try a blind test.

<http://blindsearch.fejus.com/>

~~~
diego
That test only compares the result links. It's missing a significant chunk of
the experience: autocomplete, instant results, highlighting, social results,
best-guess results, calculator functions, etc. It would have been a decent
blind test maybe ten years ago.

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donrhummy
I've tried it numerous times, usually every time I read another report about
it being as accurate as Google. I have never found that to be the case. I
tried it again today and as usual, the results were much less than helpful
(particularly when searching for computer problem solutions).

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Urgo
Maybe I'm doing something wrong but just based on submitting sitemaps to
google and bing I'm going to have to disagree with this statement. Google has
successfully indexed over 1.2 million pages that I've told it about. Bing
fails every time trying to read the sitemap files (says they are empty?? the
same ones google uses...) and has only indexed about 3,000 pages.

I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say this statement is false. They
can't even index pages you tell it about.

(If you're curious my site is <http://socialblade.com/youtube> and the 1.2
million plus pages indexed are statistics on youtube channels)

~~~
rhplus
_1.2 million plus pages indexed_

Oh, please. This site is a content farm. You've even have placeholder images
saying "ADVERTISE HERE". Why should Bing - or Google - index this? What value
does a search result to your site give to a user who most likely is searching
for actual videos?

~~~
Urgo
A content farm exists to take existing content and farm it out for people to
find with no additional value. That's not at all what my site is. My site
allows any youtube user to track their statistics and compare themselves with
any other user on the site. Every user in the database (over 215k right now)
gets updated at least once a day by querying youtube's api and ranks are
updated, etc. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who use
the site daily to track said data. Very different then a content farm that
just tricks people serving up recycled videos. :)

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galuggus
I've been using bing quite a lot recently as google is sporadically blocked in
China. Coincidentally I was remarking to myself this morning how incredibly
poor the results are compared to google

Time for duckduckgo

~~~
rhplus
The Chinese version is apparently in beta. Try with the version set to USA:
<http://www.bing.com/?setmkt=en-us>

~~~
galuggus
thanks

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cyanbane
I find the Bing photo of the day much more interesting than the Google Doodle.
Its something so simple, but the results are so comparable at this point
(commoditized?) that the photo vs doodle stands out for me. I do however still
use Google for 2 kinds of searches: the exact odd page search (ie I know I
have seen on blog x a story about SignalR etc) and "define:" queries to get
definitions. Other than that though Bing or a direct wikipedia search suffices
pretty damn well in almost all other cases.

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moultano
The claim in the title is not made in the article.

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drucken
My first acid test for search engines, other than a baseline performance
speed, for 15 years has been simple: search for myself.

Whoever finds either the most up-to-date or most results about me in the first
page of results, gets my (reluctant) vote as my default search engine.

This is not because of any particular vain reason but my name is esoteric
enough to be almost unique and with time, despite my careful attempts, I have
ended up leaving a significant Internet trail.

Fortunately, only one search engine always finds details about me: Google.

Bing shows ZERO results about me, after even 10 default pages!

However, I would still use Google over other search engines for one reason
alone: _date-ranged searching_. This is very useful for many reasons.

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Shank
I'd argue differently. At least according to CloudFlare, Google Bot crawls my
site (<http://tshock.co/>) literally ten times more frequently than the second
place leader, and that's Baidu.

To each their own.

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fpgeek
In other news, Pepsi says "Pepsi is now as good as Coke". </sarcasm>

First, why should you believe them? Second, even if they're right, why does it
matter? "As good as" isn't a good enough reason to switch for most people.

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grailholder
The problem with Bing is not that it is not as good as Google, but rather that
it IS NOT Google. People who are used to Google's design and have a bag of
trick that they associate with it will not switch over to Bing even if
statistical evidence finds it's results to be more relevant for all searches.
Google will stay good enough for most of it's users for years to come.

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cargo8
'freshness' may be as good as Google, but unfortunately 'relevance' is still
way, way worse...

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ramblerman
"is now at leas on par with google"

I think this is the problem, by playing catchup, innovation has taken a back
seat. Being on par with google is a subpar goal for a competitor.

It's somewhat similar to google plus trying to catch up to facebook.

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vyrotek
Hmm. I think I'll give it a try and replace my default search for a week or so
and see how the results are. I imagine I go to Google more out of habit than
quality. We shall see.

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murali89
I doubt the claims about being 'as good as', in this article, but It is a very
well written and informative article about the internals of search engines.

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jebblue
Bing? What's that? As good as? Seriously? That's the goal now? I'm not a
Google fan but guess who I'm not a fan of.

~~~
georgemcbay
"I'm not a Google fan but guess who I'm not a fan of."

Uhm.. Google?

Easiest. Quiz. Ever.

~~~
jebblue
hehe ah ok good catch. Well no I meant Microsoft, what I was saying was that
I'm not a huge fan of Google but I am somewhat of a fan.

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pan69
Well, I'm glad that Microsoft tells us that.

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enraged_camel
The moment you publicly compare yourself to the dominant player in your field,
you have lost.

~~~
tikhonj
Well, Apple ran those annoying Mac vs PC ads. And while the ads themselves may
or may not have worked well, Apple has not _lost_ in the personal computer
field. (Well, depending on how you define "lost" I guess. But I think they
haven't lost by most definitions.)

~~~
FaceKicker
Considering they've stopped running those ads since gaining a ton of traction
in the PC industry over the past few years, I think those ads are probably
supporting evidence of GP's claim (if anything), not a counter-example.

Edit: I went back and actually reread what GP said and realized I was wrong if
interpreted literally, but I took it to mean something more like "you know
you're currently losing when you compare yourself to the competition". But
yeah, my bad, you're definitely right under the literal interpretation - Apple
didn't lose and may actually win at the end.

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helpbygrace
But not as famous as Google.

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falling
It’s pretty good, but I wish it was as pretty on the desktop as it is on
mobile.

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shingen
"The company's Caffeine index spans 100 million gigabytes of data ... "

That's a painful number. I wonder what Facebook's image data store is up to
these days.

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drhowarddrfine
Microsoft says a lot of things that aren't true.

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philip1209
AHAHAHAHHAHA AHAHAHHAHAHHAAHHA AHAHAHAHAHH breath AHAHHAHHAAHAH AHAHAHAHAH

