
Bing’s Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore - adventured
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-30/microsoft-s-bing-is-not-the-laughingstock-of-technology-anymore
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ToFab123
Bing still is a laughingstock unless you change your regional settings on
bing.com to USA. If you do that you may find that you have little need to
visit Google anymore.

It is my impression that most users are completely unaware of the effect
changing region on bing have and that bing is amazing if you do.

So odd that default setting, for most, is non-US and for those user Bing is
still very much a laughingstock compared to Google.

US and non-US bing is not the same product. Non-US lacks most of the cool
features found on the US version so why non-US is the default is something
that has pusseled me for years. Very odd behavior to degrade your own product
the way Microsoft does with Bing.

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ducttape12
I've said it before and I'll say it again - replacing Balmer with Nadella was
one of the best things they've done.

People go on and on about Facebook and Google, but I've been really impressed
with Microsoft. They're making some really great, innovative products - and
they're turning a nice profit too.

(yes, I realize Bing is just a Google clone, but I'm talking more generally
about the company)

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locknumber110
Yeah, it really is like night and day. I'm an old-school Linux fanboy. I
remember when the Halloween documents were fresh news. I had a four-digit
Slashdot ID. I've built LFS just for fun. I used to use a dollar sign when
spelling the company's name. For most of my adult life I've had absolutely no
love for Ballmer-led Microsoft.

But the last few years have shown that Microsoft under Nadella is a completely
different animal. Ten years ago, if someone told me that one of the best IDEs
on the Linux desktop would be an MIT-licensed project from Microsoft, I'd have
thought they were drunk, crazy, _and_ high. But lo and behold, we have VS
Code, and it's awesome. There's MS engineers contributing code to the Linux
kernel. One of the best ad-blocking web browsers on Android is Microsoft Edge.
A Debian distro (albeit one without a Linux kernel) is a 1st-party app on the
Windows app store.

It's gotten to the point where I'm seriously wondering how much code under the
hood of their prototype demo "Modern OS" is from Microsoft, and how much is
actually from Canonical. They're already adding a proper Linux kernel for
WSL2.

Interesting times.

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mc32
One thing I’ll give Bing. They don’t tend to editorialize or curate searches
to sanitize politics, news and causes.

Now of course they do try their best to keep illegal things from getting
indexed. Not talking about that.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
I'm just happy that there is still some semblance of competition in search
land. Having Bing, DDG and Google all playing in the space guarantees that at
least Google is forced to innovate to maintain their near-monopoly.

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snowwindwaves
Ddg apparently uses bing.

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wolco
And google and there own data.

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skinnymuch
But mostly Bing

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Zanni
What's staggering to me is that Bing can have a borderline insignificant share
of the search market and still bring in $7.5 _billion_ in revenue.

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corwin7
I laugh at anyone using Microsoft software or products.

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jambutters
I thought it was apple maps or Google plus

