
Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore - adventured
http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-07-19/microsoft-turns-bing-from-a-joke-into-an-ad-business
======
s3r3nity
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.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
"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.

~~~
WorldMaker
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.)

------
blakesterz
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.

~~~
emilyfm
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!

~~~
arien
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...

~~~
emilyfm
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.

------
izendejas
Bing does not support literal searches. This is a dealbreaker for me,
particularly since their language models aren't very precise if at all
employed.

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.

~~~
lmmlzxx
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.

~~~
thoman23
Of course Google supports exact string matching. Just put your term in double
quotes.

~~~
PudgePacket
It feels like they haven't for a while, eg this
[http://i.imgur.com/zEDt5tD.png](http://i.imgur.com/zEDt5tD.png)

~~~
lmmlzxx
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.

------
jkmcf
I use Bing whenever I'm dissatisfied with Google's results. Bing has always
returned worse results in this case. YMMV.

~~~
SerLava
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."_

~~~
nhebb
> 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.

~~~
SerLava
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.

------
graeme
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.

~~~
SerLava
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.

~~~
graeme
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.

~~~
SerLava
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.

------
ac29
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.

~~~
dannylandau
By that measure, you earn about $2.7 a month, and that is sufficient for you
to use Bing over Google!?

~~~
ac29
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.

~~~
onion2k
How do you factor in the cost to your reputation when people see you using
Bing?

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

~~~
onion2k
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.

------
Animats
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.

~~~
dx034
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.

------
kyriakos
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)

------
gourou
Facebook is surprisingly absent of the comparison chart ($8 billion) and
Google too ($30 billion)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-22/google-
and...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-22/google-and-facebook-
lead-digital-ad-industry-to-revenue-record)

------
dannylandau
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.

------
ethana
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.

------
garyclarke27
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.

------
orionblastar
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.

------
shalmanese
Bing: The "is pepsi okay?" of search engines.

~~~
toomanybeersies
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.

------
marssaxman
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.

~~~
mrweasel
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.

~~~
toomanybeersies
maps.bing.com also works. So do images.bing.com and news.bing.com, so I guess
they're following the Google schema for that.

Bing video search is available for me in New Zealand, interesting that it
doesn't work for you in Denmark.

------
sreenadh
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.

------
christogreeff
Have not used Bing on purpose for some time, but is it just me or does it feel
quick snappy?

------
timwaagh
I heard something about people using bing because fewer priacy results get
blocked on it.

------
awqrre
Not Bing Search, but views from Bing Maps bird's eye view are often very
good...

------
yCloser
I use Bing for porn

------
toomanythings4
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.

------
blahi
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.

~~~
cool_penguins
Huh? Doesn't chrome open a new tab?

------
troAway123
Actually, yes it is, Bloomberg.

------
Steko
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.

~~~
FireBeyond
I don't know that as someone who uses DuckDuckGo, you can really complain
about Bing's name.

~~~
Retra
Hey, at least Google and DuckDuckGo don't reek of Marketing Team Branding
Magic. Dollar-for-letter, Bing kind of sucks.

------
PhantomGremlin
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 to power users.

~~~
dexwiz
Can you give an example? Sometimes it cannot find what I am searching for, but
I have never thought it was intentional.

~~~
louthy
Try searching for 'hoogle'. What I want is this:
[https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/](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.

~~~
dexwiz
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.

~~~
c22
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://"](http://").

