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Has Bing Already Overtaken Yahoo?
nk497 writes "Microsoft's newly revamped search tool Bing has already overtaken Yahoo in the US and globally, according to StatsCounter. The net traffic watcher said Bing has topped Yahoo 16.28% to 10.22% in the US, and 5.62% to 5.13% globally. Though the firm noted Bing's popularity may drop off after the excitement wears off, the firm also said: 'Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo at a cost of $40 billion it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.' Google, of course, still leads by a considerable margin."
I'm skeptical of this data--at least worldwide. When I click the gs.statcounter.com link and go to Statistic:Search Engine and Country/Region:Asia I see Baidu at an alarmingly low rate. Barely even recognizable. The CSV sheet shows it at zero until 03/05/2009 which is hilarious and then it bumps up to 1%. Yeah, I think they have some problems with their data collection methods or who is reporting this data anyhow. Maybe their software's only in English? I don't know but that data alarms me and I would take their stats in other realms lightly as that's a vote of no confidence from me--something is skewed horribly and I don't like it. They might be right about Yahoo! compared to Bing but this is certainly not reassuring.
My work here is dung.
At work on Friday I mistyped a URL and it brought me to Bing. I didn't know what it was and assumed it was a re-routed parked domain or something - I didn't bother looking at it since I didn't recognize it. So my first impression of the site, thanks to the redirect, was that it was an annoying ad site.
My webcomic
It is simply proof that if you throw away a truckload of cash in advertising you can get anyone to try something once. As someone who uses Yahoo Search(I personally think it is MUCH better than Google's) I'm afraid Bing just doesn't compare. Let me give an example.-
I just tried a search in all three engines. I searched for "The Dark Knight". In Yahoo there is a little blue button below the search box which is the "more" tab. In that under Dark Knight I got not only the ones you would expect on the left, like Dark Knight reviews and trailers, but the related concepts has interviews with Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, articles about Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, etc. Two thumbs up on giving me not only the information that I was looking for, but in also giving me a springboard to learn much more right there at the top thanks to the blue "more" button. The only downside is the button needs to be more clearly labeled.80/100, 20 points off for not clearly labeling the GUI.
Now Google,same search. Their version of a "more" tab is a few links at the bottom, as clicking more at the top simply gives more Google software unrelated to my search, like Google Blogs. The results at the bottom are also more useless than Yahoo's, as there is links for The Fantastic Four and Iron Man there. These of course have nothing to do with the subject of my search the Dark Knight. While many of the main searches are the same, the lack of a "more" tab and related concepts means I'll have to do more work to search related subjects. I also would have had a hard time finding the excellent interview I just read with Christopher Nolan about the movie as I had no idea who the director was on Dark Knight. So I give it a 65/100.
Now let's try Bing-OMFG! Who the hell wrote this thing? I'm sorry, but this just sucks. While its main search algorithm works in a similar manner to the big two the related searches make no fricking sense. I have Dark Knight Houston, Dark Knight Shoes? and links to Dark Angel. Oooookay. Apparently it is the same search engine they had when it was MSN, which we all used to make fun of for had bad it would try to "help" and shill products. For those that never had the 'pleasure' you could type something like "Nissan" and get links for table lamps. It was pretty much ads disguised as a search engine. So considering out of the three engines I got the most useless amount of "helpful" links out of bing i would give it a thumbs down-45/100.
So I think we can see with this little demonstration why Bing had a search and then dropped right back down to the bottom of the barrel. because anyone who uses Google or Yahoo who tries this thing is going to see how piss poor its related searches are (Dark Knight Shoes?) and go back to the big two. While I am glad they didn't buy Yahoo because like everything web related MSFT touches it would have ended up "Yahoo Live Search 2.0 Optimized for Windows Vista" or some other bling bling nightmare, just doing this single search I can see that MSFT better buy a search engine from SOMEBODY, because they have a shitty one now. In the non web world MSFT can get by with just having an "okay" product by pushing it heavily with advertising. With the web competition is only a single click away and that trick isn't going to work. Which is why they are at #3 and will probably stay there. Because if it is one thing has taught us, it is that despite all their money MSFT hasn't got a fricking clue when it comes to the web.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The only reason I even knew bing existed was from reading slashdot. I'm a bit of a luddite so I don't catch onto the latest fads (e.g. I had texting is banned from my cell phone) but I think that it's right that the only people who know about bing are the ones who were looking for it, or are interested in computing in general. Therein lies the problem for MS. They could pour billions into advertising but I think most people tune out commercials nowadays, don't they?
I don't have cable, so I searched for the bing commerical on youtube. I watched it, it seemed like useless fluff that's not going to convince anyone to try anything because they never actually said what their search engine did differently from google, except that it was better (better at what? finding restaurants? searching for back pain? wtf?).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Not TFS. TFA. TFA is dated TODAY. Go click the link. It really doesn't hurt.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Lexical processing is Google's Achilles heal. It's a royal pain when search results come back which silently discard odd-duck search terms. Try searching for "SAMe". Interesting, today for the first time, Google actually has a correct lexical match as the top result. The other day I had a search term where a punctuation mark was a critical disambiguator. That didn't work too good.
One that I beat my head against all the time is electronic component part numbers. The full, full, full part number using ends in six alphabetic digits which describes the production variant, right down to what the production engineer ate for breakfast that morning. It's kind of like net, net net, and net net net in real estate. (Interestingly, today Google returns pages titled "triple-net" for a search on "net net net". Another small improvement behind the scenes.) You'll often get the net net part name in distributor's catalogues, but if you want the data sheet, you often need to search on the just the root of the part, if you can guess which prefix stem that might be.
Of course, what you really want is to search on AT91SAM7* or AT91* depending on whether the programming technique in question applies to one part or the extended family.
And please, for the love of God, when I type in the part number which I know in advance is correct for the datasheet I'm seeking, return at least *one* authoritative hit in the top ten from the actual company that makes the part in question (by the billions, in some cases). Argh!!!! Argh!!!!!! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some vendors manage to place themselves in the top ten for their own parts, most don't. What's the problem? Is serving up your own data sheet too much like support and not enough like sales? Are these companies deliberately detuning their search results? The situation baffles me.
It's my daily sports fix hitting that little "vaporize into the cloud" button on top scoring results from alldatasheets.com which teases but doesn't deliver.
I suspect its not zero cost to extend Google to fully handle the long, long, long tail of variously truncated designator strings.
Another one: when I type "R" I mean the R language. Always. Get over it. If Google is going to gather my click trail, there's the one main thing they need to digest on my behalf. Thousands of queries over on r-seek and they still don't get it, usually discarding the term "R" entirely if it doesn't fit their prebuilt result for the companion search terms. +R doesn't work well either, as it forces Google to return every document index with an "R" subsection.
This is something that no software application has yet achieved. It's the baby Turing test. Identify three to ten personal-style hot buttons of the particular user, and then *don't do them*.
Instead, we've invented the world's shortest short bus: the software watches me replace with the original text the auto-correct garbage just inserted by Word (if I'm in for a bout of self-flagellation) or some other high-function IDE, and then auto-correct restores the thing I just manually deleted. Several times in a row, in a pique of futility. Isn't that the technical definition of a failed marriage?
If the Unabomber says to you "don't do that", while making eye contact for the first time in a decade, does it register? For Microsoft products, hardly ever. For Google, not quite enough.
I'm not taking any other version of the Turing test seriously until this one is dispatched.