Bing Now Nearly As Good As Google — Says Microsoft 405
An anonymous reader writes "Harry Shum, who oversees research and development for Microsoft's Bing search engine, believes his company has now matched Google's ability to build software platforms that can harness the power of tens of thousands of servers. — 'For many years, we've really tried to play the catch-up game,' Shum says. 'And now we feel that after a lot of effort, we understand search quality problems better than before, and that if you look at Google and Bing, the quality is beginning to be very comparable.' While his comments might be a little biased, many people do share the same opinion. How do you feel about Bing's search results compared to Google's? For example DuckDuckGo, the privacy oriented search engine, uses Bing's back-end and has gained a small following on Slashdot."
Holy self-reference! (Score:3, Interesting)
I had submissions rejected in the past for referencing Slashdot in them. Have the rules changed?
And while we're at it, would DuckDuckGo's "small following on Slashdot" please enter and sign in with a few posts?
anecdotally.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Another alternative is duckduckgo.com, trying that out lately, seems to be alright...
Verbatim search (Score:5, Interesting)
Since discovering the verbatim feature for Google, the search works once more. Most of my searches are now done with it enabled.
I gave up on Google search a long time ago. (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I started using Bing once Google became incapable of trying to correct my every search. Google, unless my search query is "HowdoIfixmyspacebar," maybe you should consider all those missing spaces as intentional?
But then, I don't have any taste anyway.
Search is fungible (Score:1, Interesting)
As soon as Google started requiring me to use Javascript in order to see my search results I started to use Bing. I haven't looked back since.
Thank goodness "search" is (now) a fungible commodity. Google better start smartening up if it wants to be relevant in the near future. Companies can't rely on the ignorant masses to forever stay ignorant of the competition and their immoral privacy policies.
Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
But whilst G+, Maps, Image search are all as well integrated and continue to work better, both in accuracy of things I want, and speed to get them, why would I bother to change to something that's /almost/ as good. Plus, having saved searches available on the phone to check something after searching on the laptop has been more useful than I thought it'd be. So why use Bing on desktop and Google on phone? Makes no sense.
For now, Google's still the best for what I need it to do.
Re:Holy self-reference! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Holy self-reference! (Score:5, Interesting)
And while we're at it, would DuckDuckGo's "small following on Slashdot" please enter and sign in with a few posts?
I've been using DuckDuckGo for some time, primarily for the privacy and lack of filtering based on my previous queries (finding political articles that are *not* slanted toward my bias, for example). However, during this time I've discovered that if I really need to find an answer to something I'm entering a `!google' into my search (which forces DuckDuckGo to use Google). :-\
I Use Bing for the Picture (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Holy self-reference! (Score:3, Interesting)
I gave it a go recently when it was mentioned as a way to escape the search bubble and eliminating the bias of a search engine knowing too much about you. Was then surprised how on a search for ubuntu it quite prominently gave a link about how ubuntu was an imperfect alternative to windows. It took me back to "get the facts".
Re:anecdotally.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Describing Google as Evil and Microsoft as the better alternative to that seems a little suspect to me. There seems to be a fairly widespread ant-Google campaign going on, and the prevalence of it versus anything they've actually done lately seems extremely out of balance ... almost as if it were being promoted by their competition. FaceBook was caught funding it once .ii I would doubt they or others would drop their plans so quickly. I'm not saying people are annoyed by Google's behaviour, I just think there's a non-grassroots push behind the vast majority of it.
No (Score:5, Interesting)
I just tried bing on a list of sample (obscure, complicated) queries that are relevant to me, personally. google found the correct page in 3 out of 4. bing got 1 out of 4.
I wouldn't make any grandiose claims on a sample size of 4. But from a "quick and dirty check" perspective, I won't be trying bing again anytime soon.
BTW: since when are vendor competitiveness claims newsworthy? It always annoys me when stories like this show up on slashdot. Yes, the high-powered $vendor_X executive whose livelihood depends on $product_X has publically claimed that it is equivalent. This is a story? I don't care which vendor you're talking about: the vendor's own claims about relative competitiveness are not newsworthy. Wait for an (impartial) third party to declare that $vendor_X's products, which historically were viewed as inferior to $vendor_Y, are now equal or superior. Or wait for $vendor_X to announce a new feature. Then you have a story.
So, what they're saying is (Score:5, Interesting)
they finished scarfing down Google's search database, and are just working on fine tuning what percent of false negatives to return?
Re:anecdotally.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes microsoft is evil as well, but they don't own 80-90% of web services at the moment.
While I'm no Google fanboy, I recognize that it's a company that gives me not only search results in exchange for my information/attention. It also gives me a fairly good browser, a useful map system and a decent smartphone OS. It was also, if I recall correctly, the first to implement a free web-based office suite and huge inbox storage capacity (2Gb while Hotmail was still limited to 2Mb or 10Mb - I forget). So that's why I use it - someone will use my search information and, frankly, my search history is not the kind of personal information I care about giving away. So I let Google have it and help finance some good products and technologies. Microsoft, on the other hand, rarely gives anything for free, and when they do, it's usually crap. So even if they were equal in terms of search effectiveness, I'd still use Google. For search. Not that I'll ever use Google+, because my personal information I actually care about giving away.
Bing is grrreat! if you want...... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Holy self-reference! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:anecdotally.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There seems to be a fairly widespread ant-Google campaign going on, and the prevalence of it versus anything they've actually done lately seems extremely out of balance
Thank you for saying it.
I've grown wary of Google, but so far I have not yet seen a reason to actually distrust them. For MS, on the other hand, I can't find a reason not to.
Re:Holy self-reference! (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and ignoring what I searched for in favor of what they think I meant.
This was the first thing that irritated me about Google. I think it's been about 2 years now when I
realized that writing stuff in quotes didn't have the effect it used to.
Then they just started auto
correcting you.
Then pushing the "search for {original query} instead" link stopped making a difference.
Then there was the excessive bubbling.
And then my paranoia kicked in when they started merging all their privacy policies and I moved
away from Google for good.
I've been on ddg for some time now and (after getting used to the different api & interface) I have
come to like it and actually a finding it quite powerful.
Something I want to look into though is how much of the search results are organic and which
come from yahoo's BOSS infrastructure.
Re:Holy self-reference! (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair to the parent my very first reaction to the article was to jump on Bing and type "Linux" into the search field to see if it still directed to Microsoft's results first.
Looks like they've cleaned up their act, but the parent is right. For the longest time the search was horrendously biased towards Microsoft products and services.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)