

Reasons to use Bing - pepethecow
http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2014/10/13/reasons-you-should-be-using-bing/

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foxhill
how does this get upvoted?

> I work for Bing

really.

the majority of the features listed that make bing "better" are in google. the
rest are either entirely subjective, or re-hashes of the previous "feature".

if you love emacs/linux/bing/zsh/ps4/some-other-well-known alternative-to-a-
mainstream-product and use it, great, but this sort of fanboy-ism is how
heated and petty "wars" start out on the internet. and we do not need another
one of those. please.

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click170
I like that there's competition, that drives improvement of everyone's
product.

To me though, improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my
privacy. For this reason, DuckDuckGo wins hands-down. They may not have top
notch search results [yet], but I'm happy to help them get there since they
respect my privacy more than Google or Bing, who seem like they're just
competing with each other and ignoring the privacy aspect.

~~~
chestnut-tree
_" improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my privacy"_

Bing's privacy policy is far from perfect, but it's more informative than
Google's privacy policy. Here's an example extract from Bing's privacy policy

 _" We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms)
separately from any account information that directly identifies the user,
such as name, email address and phone numbers. We have technological
safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorised correlation of this
data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, and cookies
and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months."_

They also clearly tell you that wiping your search history doesn't mean
erasing it from their search logs:

 _" For Bing Search in your browser, using the search terms you enter and the
results you click, search history provides an easy way to revisit the sites
and searches you've used before. You may clear your search history from
appearing on the site by following the steps provided here or by going to the
Bing preferences page noted above. Clearing your history removes it from the
Search History service and prevents that history from being displayed on the
site, but does not delete information from our standard search logs..."_

[http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-
gb/bingandmsn/d...](http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-
gb/bingandmsn/default.aspx)

Now compare that to Google's privacy policy which tells you nothing about
whether your data is anonymised and for how long your data is kept. And all
this from a company that _does_ associate your search activity with your
account (the one with with your date of birth, gender, location and possibly
phone number). Remember too that Google arguably tracks and records online
behaviour more than anyone else. Given the staggering amounts of data they
collect, you'd think that would give them the impetus to be more informative
about how they use your data, but it's quite the opposite. Their privacy
policy tells you very little:

[https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/](https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/)

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sjclemmy
Reasons 2,3,4,5 and 6: photographs in the background. What's that got to do
with search?

~~~
hadoukenio
Thanks for saying this. I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this odd.

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duckingtest
Ok, I did a test. "zero to one" in Google - all results on the first page are
book related. In Bing - not even ONE result is about the book, instead I got
things like "0 (number)" (Wikipedia), "nhibernate - Modeling one to zero or
one" (a stackoverflow question), a clock named "onezero", "Zero Hour" movie on
imdb... It's in 'related searches' but that's it.

Not book related results are ok, but not even one book related link in the
first five pages? I think I will stay with Google for now.

(I did this in private mode to disable Google search personalization).

edit: Ok, Bing starts showing the book when I change location to United
States. Default results are these [0]. Seems they really need to work on their
location-related personalization, these results are complete trash.

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/v5LqSBB.png](http://i.imgur.com/v5LqSBB.png)

~~~
kelukelugames
[https://www.bing.com/search?q=zero+to+one&go=Submit&qs=n&for...](https://www.bing.com/search?q=zero+to+one&go=Submit&qs=n&form=CHRDEF&pq=zero+to+one&sc=8-10&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=ce36f5fbaceb40d6b858a9c087578bf6)

i got book results...first link is to amazon for buying the book.

Tried it again in incognito. Same results.

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livingparadox
There were only reasons I found compelling: 10, 12, 15, 20

10 Google has to a certain extent, but I've not seen anything as interesting
as digging into the individual pose of a picture.

12 I typically use wolfram for. 15 I have yet to have a need for. 19 is
interesting, but not something I particularly have use for.

In every other case, the reasons were irrelevant to me (echoing the IDGAF
towards all the background-photo related "reasons") or the feature is present
in Google. Often better.

So... for me, Google still is my search engine of choice. Especially in
regards to reason #1. I took the bingiton challenge, and In every instance of
a search query I actually make on an everyday basis, Google either won or tied
with bing. Most of those searches are code-related.

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SlipperySlope
49\. Porn, especially video search.

I dislike Microsoft and their evil ways, but Bing has its uses.

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valarauca1
Bing is currently very useful for images and videos. I find its much more
accurate then Google. Both of these search fields are far ahead of google.

Currently I use Google for my text based information searching. It actually
uses deliminators +/\- site: *.pdf etc. these are very powerful tools, that
bing doesn't support. And rarely used by most users I assume.

But if I want to find a reaction image, funny (or illicit) video. Bing wins
out.

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ChrisGaudreau
Huh. Bing has definitely improved, but half of the features listed by the
author don't seem to work for me. Am I doing it wrong?

Further, I almost always get better results from Google. If I search for
"pizza" on Bing, the top local result is an obscure restaurant a few miles
away with a one-star rating. The ones that are close to me and have high
ratings are at the bottom or not even listed.

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laughfactory
Occasionally I try Bing and usually find that it doesn't yield very relevant
search results. I almost always have to switch over to Google to find what I'm
looking for. Plus it drives me crazy that you have no way of specifying you
only want current results (within the past year). Bing sucks, Google doesn't.

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commentzorro
Google is still much better when searching for non-purchase non-torrent
downloadable music, movies, and ebooks. Plus Google has those convenient links
to chilling effects, which, when the site is available, surprisingly provide
pretty close to direct links to what I was looking for.

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josu
A thing that I find really useful in Google search that Bing does not offer
(at least by default), is that it shows you the PDF's creation date. Eg.:

>Aug 10, 2010 - 2. 1. This paper examines the implications of the Fund
accepting membership in the.

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expr-
The following is not a reason not to use Bing for others, but (just saying):
almost none of these features work for me in Finland. Seriously, there was not
even a calculator available a while back.

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jaredcwhite
Maybe Bing has improved lately, but a year or so ago I tried it for a while
and was not impressed. However, more recently I tried using DuckDuckGo and
find it pretty excellent. It's surprisingly useful for esoteric developer-y
stuff I'm often searching for. Since iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite offer it as a
default search engine option in Safari, I've been using it full-time. I only
rarely access Google for web searches now, which is pretty awesome.

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icantthinkofone
Within the first ten, he lists the wallpaper image as about five of them. Many
of the items on the list are the same as what Google does. While he says Bing
does as well or better in some areas, he never mentions the opposite, that
Bing does less well than Google in others (and how many others?).

These aren't reasons to switch to Bing. It's an advertisement.

I haven't checked in a year or so but, last I heard, Microsoft loses about $2
billion dollars every year on Bing.

~~~
piyush_soni
Not only those features are done by Google exactly the same way, but the fact
is, _bing copied_ most of them (if not all) after Google did it - including
blindly copying their search results directly from Google - as everyone here
might already know([http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/02/01/microsofts-bing-
caugh...](http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/02/01/microsofts-bing-caught-
copying-google-search-results/) ).

It's probably a propaganda post, I'm not sure how it even got 13 points (at
present).

~~~
sremani
Propaganda?! I am sure, I am not on politico. There were some valid reasons to
use Bing, and I use bing for Bing Rewards and donate the points to my local
elementary school for Microsoft to donate Surface to them (even though I am
far far away from the target). If Google works for you that is great, but the
difference in terms of result quality is not stark, but perceptions have stuck
and bing is suffering from that.

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stealthlogic
Bing is horrible.

