Google Tweaks Algorithm As Concern Over Bing Grows 397
SharkLaser writes "As Bing gets closer to capturing almost 33% of the market share in the U.S., Google has again made a large tweak to its algorithms to provide more up-to-the-minute search results. The change affects around 35% of queries and is intended to give users more recent news and stories. For breaking news stories the search engine will now weight more heavily the most recent coverage, and not just those sites that are linked the most, and for general terms the search engine values fresh content more than old. Google is hoping that these recent new changes will provide better search experience and stops users from switching over to Bing, which just recently launched its own GroupOn like site."
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who thinks this has anything to do with algorithms, as opposed to things like the "Bing Bar" coming preloaded on Windows 7?
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
or if you do software updates on XP machines finding the default search engine swapped after the update
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Installing MS Office 2010 seems to switch your search engine to install the Bing add-on as well.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, if you've tried to change the default IE search engine from Bing to Google or anything else, you'd see how they're achieving this.
Chrome has 3 big buttons, Google, Yahoo, Bing. IE has obscured the setting for default search engine under several layers behind slow loading servers.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
When I install or upgrade IE a popup asks me to choose my default search engine. It's true Bing is the default under "Express Settings", but you are given the choice.
Everyone knows most users don't switch from defaults. Everyone, including Google who paid Mozilla to set them as the default search engine for years now. And I don't believe there's anything wrong with that either.
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Never popped up for me. (note: in recent years, I've only use IE at work or when I've been forced to by IE specific web sites, and I'm in the good ol' USA, where the browser ballot was never required.)
In any case, I do agree with somersault that Bing's increase in usage has much more to do with MS Windows monopoly and its' default settings.
On another note, this change to the Google algorithms sounds like it will reduce the ef
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It's a matter of pain.
The more menus you make me sit through, the more it hurts. Keeping Bing as the default on Windows costs about 1 menu (accept the defaults) - switching to something else costs about three or four menus (it's been a while), plus you load up a slow-ass page that asks you to pick something out of a list of incomprehensible choices.
At my last job, I actually saw people using Windows XP computers with the newest version of IE who hadn't actually sat through all those menus yet - every single
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
If I recall, I finally got Google by searching on Bing for how to set up Google as the search provider for IE9. I ended up downloading an addon from Google which added it to the list of search providers in IE9.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
If its set to bing, its a phenomenal PITA to switch-- Google isnt "built in", and you have to go to their "choose search provider" webpage, which has about a zillion search engines that noone cares about. And to even get there you have to navigate through internet options, under "programs".
Its incredibly user-hostile, and theres no excuse for not including the largest search engine provider by default, even if its not set as the active one.
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When I install or upgrade IE a popup asks me to choose my default search engine. It's true Bing is the default under "Express Settings", but you are given the choice.
Chrome does it on the first run as well, but, interestingly enough, they used to disable it [chromium.org] in those markets where they run into significant competition (in this case, Russia, where the local search engine Yandex is dominant, and Google is a runner-up). They've since put the engine selector back [chromium.org] after Yandex raised a fuss about it.
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I was helping a friend set up her new computer.
She opened up Internet Explorer and noticed the default search engine was Bing.
She tried to change the default search engine to Google.
Her: Why is it taking so long to change the search engine?
Me: Why not just download Google Chrome?
Problem solved. :-)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean just like Firefox defaulting to Google on millions of installs? Or how about Adobe Acrobat reader defaulting to installing Chrome ( which defaults to Google Search ) on 10s of millions of installs?
Product tie-ins are a fact of life in the software industry.
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Except that Microsoft has a dominant position in the OS market, and Google does not.
But Internet Explorer only accounts for 23% of the browser market now. This means that 77% of the browsers in use have Google installed by default.
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I install and use Windows 7. What's a Bing Bar? I've never seen it, but I assume you're talking about Windows Live Essentials that is a separate and optional download.
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I fired up my new Asus UX31 last night and as part of the setup it forced me to accept the Bing bar before I could continue the installation. In the EULA it said "if you do not accept these terms, uninstall the Bing bar". Pretty silly. I made a point of enabling the "return my usage statistics to MS", searching for Google Chrome and then installing it, then uninstalling the Bing bar.
Then again perhaps this was part of an MS deal with ASUS rather than something that happens on all Windows 7 SP1 installs.
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Windows 7 defaults to Bing (If you try to change it, it gives you a choice of anyone but Google) in the search bar. Doesn't matter if any "Bing Bar" is installed.
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Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
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Well Overall IE usage has dropped to under 50% [Citation] [cnn.com] So it may not be a major factor here. I think the issue is that Bing has reached a good enough stage. So the algorithm may just raise the bar up a bit. Competition is good.
IE8/9 Express Settings (Score:2)
The "Express Settings" that even us IT people use to avoid hassle is causing the search box to default to Bing. So, when on another machine, 33% of my searches go to Bing as well. But I do not like the results, unless I'm searching for Microsoft product downloads. I usually end up manually typing in www.google.com . For most people, setting Google as your homepage is enough. But in work environments, companies have their own homepages, which means the search box/address bar is king.
At least Chrome give
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If you look at the actual data, that's pretty well supported. Here's [searchengineland.com] an article from Sept 8 showing that searches from Bing.com are 12% of the search market, searches from yahoo.com are 15% of the search market, and it's only when you talk about the agglomeration known as "Bing powered search" that Bing even gets close to 33% of the search market.
It seems like most people aren't really searching on Bing; they're searching on Google and Yahoo and their web browser, and occasionally Bing provides those result
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Every time bing is the default on a computer I happen to be using, I invariably say to myself "well, surely its the same as google", and try my search thru bing. And when it fails to produce what Im looking for, I reword it again. By the third search attempt, I usually say "screw it, Im using Google", whereupon I immediately find what I was looking for.
In fact, I just hit this today, where I was looking for a network throughput tester for windows. Google correctly found iperf for windows quickly, while b
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One of the reasons for this is that, across the board, there seems to be a notable reluctance for Google to include input from meatspace, whether that is for customer support or many other issues. Example: There is a web development company which poisons results in my state by automatically generating pages with an overly large (even by and according to Google standards for keyword stuffing [google.com]) amount of specific keywords. Like so: a search for "Web design My_town, My_state" will return this companies' site at
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Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time they've 'tweaked the algorithm' in the last few years, the quality of the default results seems to have gone down. They're already swamped by transient material whenever a search term gets attached to something newsworthy (If I wanted this stuff, I'd use their 'news' or 'blogs' or 'groups' search). Google routinely assumes I've made a typo whenever a query is close to a more popular search with similar spelling, and has the cheek to search for their alternative first. And of course quotes, which rarely used to be necessary, now seem to be vital to get any sort of specificity (Google assumes I'd rather see a more popular site containing some of my terms, rather than a more obscure site containing all of them). All this sophisticated second guessing has made Google a blunter instrument, and I have to resort to the same sort of tricks I needed to get useful stuff out of AltaVista back in the 90s.
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Every time they've 'tweaked the algorithm' in the last few years, the quality of the default results seems to have gone down.
Exactly. Instead of "tweaking the default algorithm", perhaps they could just add some user controls so that we could customize our experience?
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As oppposed to Bing, which is even worse?
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So, since their results are crappy, they're going to make them crappier?
Bring back ability to use plus and quotes... (Score:5, Funny)
I think newer items is a great idea. Now, if the bring back the ability to use pluses and quotes to refine my search term, I might start using them again.
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You can still use quotes. The only reason the plus was removed (in favour of the quotation marks, which accomplish the same thing) is because it interfered with searching for Google+
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+ was redundant. The only time it made a difference was for single words, and you can now achieve the same thing with quotes.
Before:
foo +bar
"foo bar"
+"foo bar" (this is the same as just "foo bar")
After:
foo "bar"
"foo bar"
"foo bar"
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I was under the impression that the query foo +bar meant that bar was mandatory and foo was optional, but that items with both would be at the top, whereas the query for "foo bar" searches for the phrase "foo bar" without considering any documents that just had foo or just had bar, but didn't have them both together.
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I was under the same impression. Also, the + makes google consider some words that are normaly ignored, like "and".
Anyway, Google always ignores symbols and numbers (and anything with non alphabetical characters, even when they are words). I'd easily switch to something that takes those into account, and make the + operator really to what was on google documentation. (That means, searching for +1234 return sites with 1234 on them.) Up to now the competitors aren't good enough.
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You are correct. I didn't mean that foo +bar and "foo bar" are the same. Let me rephrase:
foo +bar -> foo "bar"
"foo bar" (or +"foo bar") -> "foo bar"
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Functionally it may have been redundant but it was the quicker of the two by far. Especially when you are typing after " and auto completion decides you meant something other than your original intent and you lose that first quote.
That link shows a few usage scenarios where it falls apart.
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It completely broke Google for me. I always used Google with the /ncr (no country redirection) parameter, now whatever I enter it just returns a blank Google.lu entry page for me, no search results.
Whatever they did, it sucks big time. I used + and - a lot to reduce the result pages now when it works it returns tons of crap result with no meaningful pages at all.
It always 'assumes' what I want and it is always wrong!
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"It always 'assumes' what I want and it is always wrong!"
Google has become the Clippy of search engines.
A.
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my most recent example was trying to search for information on the proper syntax for multiple entries in the linux .forward file, because there's no way to include the period in front of the file name, the information returned is all about forwarding things in linux, but not about the file I'm interested in
Funny thing about that - even though the search results don't know about it, the auto-complete does know about the leading period because when I type .forward all ten or so of the auto-complete suggestions are variations on the .forward file. I don't log into google nor even allow google to set cookies on my system either so it shouldn't be getting any sort of heuristic based on previous unixy searches either.
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You'd be surprised!
Google Code search allows regex matching, e.g.: [abc]+foo [google.com].
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Europe? (Score:2)
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I know a guy who uses bing exclusively, he avoids all things google because they track everything you do.
Does he also travel everywhere by jet-powered luge because he thinks cars are so dangerous?
Always welcome the competition (Score:2)
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Bitter much?
The GP is talking about providing competition to the current search king (a good thing) and you're harping on anti-competitive business practices the company used 15 years ago when they were the dominant player in a different space.
You should be happy that Microsoft is successfully competing against Google and forcing Google to improve their product or lose market share, much like the Mozilla and Firefox browsers did 10 years ago.
simple fix (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop listing garbage in the results. Placeholder pages in sites like cnet, link farms, fake review sites and pointless aggregation pages are all contributing to people getting fed up with google and looking at the alternatives. Google ruled the roost on quality, so the masses moved over to it, now it's mostly garbage in searches.
Re:simple fix (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep. It has become absolutely clear that Google is now devoted to providing the most profitable search results rather than the best search results. The moment they went down that path they were doomed.
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Doooooooooomed!
Seriously, hyperbole much? Google has deep pockets, a lot of geeks, and a lot of infrastructure too. MS is indeed a 500lb gorilla but so is Google. Nobody is doomed at this point IT...well maybe HP, Nokia, and RIM but just them!
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The worst of all is expert exchange. Any time I do a reasonable computer related search it comes up. I think google should hit those sites occasionally with a different user agent string and not list sites with special catered content. They could still follow robots.txt rules and never index anything in the verification hits. (just prune)
This would get rid of this garbage.
Re:simple fix (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like Google to actually search for the terms I asked for, and not what it thinks I should be asking for --- I fight that bloody autocorrect feature daily. Search for any programming term and chances are you'll get a tiny message saying 'Searching for FOO instead (unless you really meant BAR)', and then irrelevant search results.
If you go look at their forums, they're full of complaints about this. Including people saying that their company name can't be found at all, because it gets autocorrected to something else if people try to search for it!
I understand why this feature's there, but please, please, provide a way to turn it off...
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That's Google's own damn fault. Their own Trends/Hot Trends and Zeitgeist "features" allowed spammers to see in almost real-time what people were searching for, and then create spamdexes for any terms that show up. Repeat across a few domains, cross-link, and voila! instant content-less link farm. I'm sure someone at Google thought Hot Trends would be clever to show, but they certainly didn't think anyone would game the system.
And don't even get me started on the tools who run referrer plug-ins that say "Y
Oh Larry, Way to Blow (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps their declining market share is because they are beginning to annoy their users. Things like their auto completion auto deleting things as you type and dropping the Boolean "+" operator. Those definitely piss me off and send me to Bing when it gets too frustrating.
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Re:Oh Larry, Way to Blow (Score:4, Insightful)
To get to the cache link, you have to open the annoying preview.
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Closer to what? (Score:3, Insightful)
As Bing gets closer to capturing almost 33% of the market share in the US...
I'm sorry, was this actually intended to tell us anything? Other than that the submitter is apparently a marketroid / Bing fanboi?
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It's significant marketshare.
Imagine if Microsoft managed to expand into Asian markets more successfully than Google.
If they managed to break past the Great Wall of Internet Isolationism.
Their marketshare would easily threaten Google's dominance.
Anywho, I think the point is that MSN Search/MS Search/Live Search/Bing (same crap) is terrible and yet Google's blunders (because Yahoo is expected to blunder) have allowed MS to actually gain a meaningful foothold in a prime market in Google's bread and butter.
I m
Don't put store results first (Score:2)
In the general listings unless I put in "purchase" "buy" "price" or something like that. I was looking up some tech specs on something that for some reason the manufacturer's website didn't have (or was buried so far I couldn't find it), and I think I found them on page 4 of the results after tons of used equip links.
Yeah, yeah, business business. Split product research searches from product purchase searches already.
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In my experience you were lucky to get a valid hit on the 4th page. I've tried to find product specifications and had to dig down through 10 or sometimes 20 pages of sellers or auction pages full of useless or inaccurate information.
Same thing tends to happen if you search for " review", pages after pages of sellers and auction sites mostly, rather than legitimate review sites.
You know what would bring a lot of users back? (Score:2)
I have yet to meet a single person who thinks it's a good idea.
From the common man's eyes, it slows down and lags as you try to type
From the eyes of nerds, it's a huge waste of bandwidth. I don't need to search s through slashdo, I just wanted to search slashdot.
The Google Homepage (Score:2)
Poor quality results (Score:3)
I find the quality of results from Bing is still very poor and dominated by link farms, a problem Google seems increasing avoiding.
Fuzzy Search Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
This kinda thing is fine when it's just ignoring "the", "and", "a" or including plural terms but now they're leaving out nouns and adjectives if they're not common enough. It was annoying enough having to stick a + in front of every word, now they've got rid of + and replaced it with quotation marks which don't seem to force search results to contain that word quite so strictly.
I'm constantly searching for rare, obscure films and books and it's annoying as hell getting results that have nothing to do with what I'm really searching for.
Don't get me started on "the following terms only appear in links pointing to this page". When has that ever been useful except to owners of link farms and fake review sites?
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The searches that don't show the words in the page are the most annoying. I search like a programmer (though I'm not one) because I learned searching on alta vista and previous search engines that required more careful queries and ordering. Natural language is great, but sometimes I want to be a bit more specific.
You know what? (Score:2)
Every time i get Social Network results.... (Score:2)
Every time I get Social Network results, or get Experts Exchange listed at the top of some .Net code search, I am one step closer to stop using Google search for good.
Side topic: their current redesigning of all their pages is making me look for alternatives to all the services they provide I still use (mainly Reader and Gmail.) There is something very wrong when Hotmail and Yahoo offer more appealing web email interfaces than you.
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I've gotten useful answers from expert sex change in the past - I just hit the cached link and scroll to the bottom for the answer. Sometimes it's crap, but as often as not there's something useful in there.
The Google search engine is not honest. (Score:2)
The Google search engine repeatedly gives me extraneous results. It has to be by design.
When an honest, or more honest, search engine is available, I'll use it.
Any suggestions?
why don't the focus on following search queries (Score:2)
Google has really gotten out of control. Their entire business shows this, externally it appears as if they are completely disconnected from department to department, and that interdepartmental communication is poor.
It also "feels" like Google has little tyrants running around, pulling sections of departments in all sorts of weird directions.
Why do I say these things? Well, searching is very annoying on Google now, if you actually know what you want.
Often Google ignores quotes, providing responses as if t
Maybe filter by 'same content, different date'? (Score:2)
So, if they want to focus on freshness of the information, removing 'rehashed' stuff is probably a lot better than just using whatever date is page says it's f
My biggest suggestion for Google (Score:3)
Is to search for what I actually ask for. Don't search for what you *thought* I meant. Don't search for all those synonyms unless I ask you to. Just. Search. For. What. I. Typed. In. Dammit.
I shouldn't have to force that by putting quotes around everything - it should be default, or at the very least a cookie.
And also ban boardreader.com and all these other crappy sites that overtake the real discussion search results with their ads and middle man tactics.
And those spam sites that somehow read your query and come back with "searching for {whatever I typed in}? Click here!"
Please and thank you, and I will stop with my increasing habit of resorting to Bing (though that suffers from some of these things too but seems marginally better) to get my work done.
More eHOW!!! (Score:4, Funny)
This is Crap! (Score:5, Informative)
"Google is facing an increasing threat from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is close to providing a third of all internet searches, either directly or via partners such as Yahoo."
Without it's partners - Bing has crap:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/
Mobile, Google = 91%, bing =1%
DeskTop Google = 82%, bing = 4%
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-10/google-s-u-s-search-market-share-rises-to-65-3-yahoo-declines.html
US Search : Google = 65% bing = 14%
http://www.karmasnack.com/about/search-engine-market-share/
Global: Google = 84%, bing = 2%
US Google = 83%, bing = 5%
Claiming that bing has 33% of the US market share on search (as in "nearly a third when including business partners such as Yahoo") is generous at best.
-CF
Look in the mirror, Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
If they don't know why they're slipping, they should take a long hard look at their own front lawn instead of glancing nervously sideways at Bing. Google Search is getting more worthless by the day. Each time they "tweak" the algorithm it gets worse. The quality of the search results themselves isn't even the most problematic issue.
The main problem is that Google refuses to search for the actual terms you entered. They search for things that are sometimes kind of related to what you're looking for and they don't even show you which parts of your search term they ignored! The only way you're getting a real search result out of Google is when you trick it into doing its job by putting quotes around every single word of your search term (and even then it sometimes ignores you). It's mind-boggling to me how they fucked this up so badly, but it sure doesn't look like they're even aware of the problem.
Re:Look in the mirror, Google! (Score:5, Informative)
Have you tried putting a + in front of your words on Google recently? The plus is deprecated, they are going to drop it, it was all over the news [google.com]. But even if the plus was supported in the future, it's a usability nightmare.
Google is less useful (Score:4, Informative)
in finding quality information than it used to be. Too many aggregator and link farms returned in the results. Too many paywalled sites. They need a non-commercial flag so you can weed out all that crap; sometimes you want neutral, authoritative information instead of the latest diet craze or gadget BS.
As an example, my family recently started experiencing respiratory distress and we suspected toxic mold because of the exceptionally damp, warm summer we had. Yet after *30* pages of search results in Google it is *impossible* to find any information of any kind that isn't trying to sell you a kit.
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I'm not so sure. Sometimes when I get a bug in brain where I remember part of something, probably out of the news, and only have a couple key words. I google and can't get anything out of the news older than six months.
Then there's the live searches, website previews on mouseover, and other Bing shit Google copied that they shouldn't have bothered with.
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Don't forget all those people trying to find out how to change the search engine back to google. That's about all I've used bing for.
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http://www.winrumors.com/bing-u-s-marketshare-flat-at-14-7-during-september/ [winrumors.com]
They were counting in Yahoo as well. Bing marketshare is essentially flat over the past few months. Yahoo marketshare is decreasing so overall Bing marketshare is shrinking. Don't be surprised if MS gives Firefox an offer they can't refuse, but that will be the end of Firefox if it happens.
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but that will be the end of Firefox if it happens.
Why? I get it, Microsoft is evil, but is their money tainted? If you respond, please only use specific and realistic example scenarios. (I won't pay any attention to vague assertions that boil down to "Micorosoft is evil and their money is tainted" anyway.)
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No, it's because Firefox's success has been tied to a web-centric, tech-savvy group of users that still makes up a large part of the user/fanbase. These users overwhelmingly use Google and switch to Bing will almost certainly alienate these users.
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No-one I know would ever type 'bing.com' into the url and search... but plenty will type the search query into IE's search field... and that defaults to Bing.
Maybe there are other microsoft things that use bing too without you realising it.
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To have so much fucking free time....
Are you unemployed?
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And before you downmod, read the page and comments of the OP's referenced page...
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K5 diary entry from 2005
K5 archives go that far back? I've been wondering, what happened to all the slashdot archives from way back, a while ago all the old stuff disappeared. Is there anyway to access it?
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I dunno, all the really important stuff [slashdot.org] still seems to be available. Maybe try a Google search instead of Slashdot's built-in search. Preface your query with "site:slashdot.org".
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http://duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com]
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Someone posted a link to this search engine in a previous thread, and I have to say, despite it's faults, it has become my search engine of choice. The results it provides aren't as good as Google's, but the !bang syntax has been incredibly convenient. If I want to search Google I type: "!google search for this" if I want to search Bing I type: "!bing search for that". I can do the same for Amazon, Flickr, Java, Google Images ("!images"), and lots of other sites.The keys typed that I waste on "!google" I sa
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But doesn't MS use the google search engine? Didn't google prove that?
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Quite an accusation. Care to back up your claim? I don't suppose you have any evidence or anything?
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Yeah, he's a busy little shit, isn't he?
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According to statcounter, Google still has an 83% share in the US...
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They were doing a particular search in the past, they couldn't find it in Google, so they tried Bing they found it. So they just stuck with it.
When they re install their PC IE defaults to Bing so they never bothered to switch.
Assume the Google is a greater Evil then Microsoft.
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There is no shame at being #2. Especially if #1 really messes up at some point.
besides advertising revenue is important and mind set is even more so.
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I call this "YouTube Syndrome", an example I'll elaborate on:
For a while, we got enhancements that were more or less expected, or logical increments - going to higher resolution videos, consolidation of various video categories into more logical components, and better UIs for Favorites and for searching. And simple things, like not having to reload an entire page while on someone's channel to watch a different video of theirs.
And that was great. But alongside, there was a growing problem wherein changes wer