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Google Tweaks Algorithm As Concern Over Bing Grows
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."
Who thinks this has anything to do with algorithms, as opposed to things like the "Bing Bar" coming preloaded on Windows 7?
which is totally what she said
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.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
competition results in better products.
Oh look another article about MS-contended Google turf that has a suspicious amount of Google-- MS++ spin on it.
How much of this did Taco have to shoot down each day?!
It's about marketing. Bing is out-marketing you, plain and simple. Providing the better product alone isn't always going to win if you let your competition market their product unmatched.
Citation required.They were hovering at the 10% mark. When did they jump to 35%?
I wonder what the numbers are in Europe, I don't know a single person who uses Bing and I barely know anyone non-technical who even knows what it is. Google is the standard here in the Netherlands, we we don't like to change things that are good.
It is always a win to the end user. Google would not have made any adjustments if there is no proper competition in the area. Look at MS how it turned out on Browser business. Even though I use google by default. Thanks to MS and Bing
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.
I’ve been using it since I gave up webcrawler in the 90’s after it left the simplicity search for spam central. Google is now $#%@WQ$ing terrible. You have top menu bar, left menu bar(still does nothing useful) ads on the right, ads at top of search, corrupted search results(ads), auto-complete/search assist forced on you, and “google Instant” magically re-enables itself regardless of clearing cookies etc Filth! ^&#%@$
Google, go restore a backup from 1999.. Otherwise, any good minimalistic alternatives?
33% of the market share? I just saw an article that claimed 14.7% for Bing.
Mind you, that was September data... things might have changed a lot since then. (Probably world data as well, not just US.)
People actually use bing. Probably from all those failed url inputs that redirect directly to bing search. Those meddling kids with their spelling!
We are but a pixel in the JPEG of life.
I'll now be able to find that video of Ms. Piggy and Grover getting it on!
Spending billions just to provide Google with the competition it needs to stay aggressive is foolish.
It took a real world war to end the airplane's patent wars. - Fâché Rouge -
Actually, define market share. People can visit any search engine anytime, and more often than not, they use Google. I've never seen anybody use Bing. Previously, Yahoo, perhaps, but never any MS search tools.
Hmmm... Google for "biters anonymous" and my old humorous K5 diary entry from 2005 about biting trolls still comes up first. I would expect that a newer item would, so apparently they didn't change it enough to screw it up.
As to Bing getting 33%, that's not surprising. Every new PC comes with Bing as the default search engine, and when I installed AVG Free on my notebook (haven't got Linux on it yet) it not only changed my search engine from Google back to Bing, it added a goddamned Bing toolbar!
Microsoft hasn't changed its evil ways, it seems.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
Searches for Bing always increase towards the end of the year. After all "White Christmas" used to be the biggest selling single of all time.
Even though the original predates even vinyl. (I had Adeste Fideles on a 78rpm record - I found it at a church rummage sale in the early 70''s, along with a wind up gramophone to play it.
Seriously? 33% of the search market? It has to be new users or new computers causing this. The same old Microsoft story of cramming as much cross-marketing on their OS as they can -- Internet Explorer being the prime example.
I know a good many non-tech users and except for those who are just too apathetic or lazy to change settings that come pre-loaded on their new desktops/laptops (you know, the "sheep" among the herd), I do not know of anyone who uses Bing to search. I still know people who use Yahoo (which, yeah, uses MS engine) but otherwise it is overwhelmingly Google. Every time I tried to it, the results were much worse or had things missing than Google. Crap in a pretty package is still crap.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
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?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Search: teest
Showing results for test
Search instead for teest
so irritating!
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.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
People aren't switching, they are just blindly typing into a search box which Microsoft hijacked. How can you fight that? The search needs of the average user are not stringent or detailed to the point where they really need Google. Is Google better, hell yeah. Does it matter? I think we have all been down this road before.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
http://www.winrumors.com/bing-u-s-marketshare-flat-at-14-7-during-september/
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.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Turn off the damn instant search BS by default.
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.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
One reason Google dominated for a long time was the austerity of the Google main page - compared to stupid MSN and Yahoo! the Google home page was clean and refreshing (and the doodles are cute.). When Yahoo! would take a good minute to load, Google was up and ready to search in five seconds. I think the advent of ubiquitous broadband and DNS prefetching and caching and the like has made novice PC users less likely to change to Google as their homepage, or to ask someone how to "make the Internet go faster." Bing is the default search on IE9's default MSN home page, which comes preloaded on Win7 machines these days. Even we don't bother to automatically change the homepage to Google any more, preferring to leave that up to the user.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
and to achieve this Google has sent their DDOS bots to attack websites and servers at an even higher rate.
Upping the relevancy rating of more recent results is sorely needed.
When it comes to searching for solutions to tech problems this still won't be enough as most of these are very
dependent on being reasonably recent.
Try googling an error that turned up on the lastest linux [insert favourite distro name here] upgrade and see how
many relevant results you get. The same applies to most software that is updated often including Googles own
android.
It doesn't help that googles advanced searches are very crude to set up and they have made it even less
convenient to find these recently.
If they won't improve I may actually end up using Bing to look for ways to find ways to deal with an issue
that cropped up in the latest version of Android or Chrome....
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.)
... that if too many pluses were required, wasn't it because google was failing to show reasonable results?
"Didn't you mean ..." is very good, I appreciate that because I make typos, but sometimes I simply got all my search string changed to nothing I wanted to search about. Yes, the other similar word might be much more famous and searched, but if I didn't make a typo, why change it? At least pluses were easy to use (same with minus, +wantthis -donotwant) with the benefit that google stopped trying to replace my correctly typed words. I like google, but I don't like being treated like a moron.
I find the quality of results from Bing is still very poor and dominated by link farms, a problem Google seems increasing avoiding.
Bing is for consumers....google is for more technical users...much like digg vs slashdot. Either way, from a personal view point, In past searches Bing has almost never provided the results I was looking for, whereas Google almost invariably does, once I get the question right. I assume this was written by someone associated with Bing. Bing and Google are simply not interchangeable. I don't know that they will ever be.
MS is a shameful example of US capitalism. These days, MS is little more than a patent parasite, same as Apple.
When I'm searching I don't want Google guessing which words I really care about.
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?
No, just a nationalistic neanderthal.
They've been acting like the YouTube management for a while now. Bring back my god damned "cached" option. No, not buried under a mobile/portrait-mode unfriendly side bar. I don't want to have to load your stupid previews. And remember my preferences for search dates, or at the very least, if I expand the option to see the dates one time, don't force me to expand every time hereafter and especially stop hiding it on your mobile version of the site. Oh Google, you had a great thing going for so long. And then there's these "on par with Canonical" annoying-and-inconvenient-as-hell blunders.
Google has passed the threshold where a company starts making decisions, just for the sake of it, that are not enhancing their customer's experience. Everything from new products that are scratched months later to dropping the + operator point to redundant internal meetings just for the sake of it.
RGdot.com
For those of you as baffled as I was at that number, it's not in the article, isn't sourced in the summary, and is patently incorrect. Maybe if Bing and Yahoo did really well in October and you combine them together since they use the same back end, you may be able to approach 33%, but to say that the Bing service itself is at 33% is false.
Yeah, he's a busy little shit, isn't he?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't have a lot of friends, though.
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But trying to find things that are actually needed? Like drivers, or troubleshooting malfunctioning software? Forget it!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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?
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 the quotes were not even there. It now in many cases rejects the use of the + modifier, which used to allow one for force that search term to show in responses. Even words in quotes are often spell checked, and modified for you on the fly.
These features are neat, but they aren't neat if you can't turn them off. There needs to be a search option such as "never ever ever fucking change any aspect or part of this search term, no matter what, you damned idiots at Google, I want all words to show up from my query, I want words in quotes to appear precisely as they are written".
I've had issues trying to search for people, even in quotes. "David" mapping to "Dave", when I know the person never appears as "Dave" anywhere, etc. Issues with IT terms being modified, such as searching for (linux "hpsa") and getting matches for (linux "hspa") or (linux "hsdpa").
Many times Google provides these changes without any explanation, with any 'did you mean?' statements, and just jumbles those responses up with what you are looking for.
Fine Google, fine. You want to "help" people find what they want. That's great. However, there is a segment of the population that knows PRECISELY what they want, and can actually TYPE at a keyboard. For them, precise searches such as (dave OR david) are preferred to typing (david) and getting responses for "dave" too.
Provide an advanced interface, and one that actually works -- as your "search enhancements" have actually made your advanced search form useless as well! Stop messing with my search queries, so that every month my search queries don't mean something else. I'd like a search for "some phrase" to actually mean the same thing, and not become quoteless the one time I use your search engine, and remain quoted the next.
I hate, I mean absolutely loath M$. I came up through Pet -> vic20 -> c64 -> amiga -> linux. I've never, ever, ever had M$ as a main OS on any desktop. I hate them, their products.
How much does it say, and I can't stress this enough, that I've tried using Bing to see how it will response to direct search queries? How much does it say, that someone so anti-microsoft has been put off by Google's complete and total lack of any coherent or even remotely detectable customer service? You can't get an issue resolved, on any front, with any problem, with any product, period, at all, ever from Google.
Google's only response to anything, is complete and total silence -- unless there is some massive issue that has 90% of their customer base enraged.
Get this Google. Get it straight. The party is over. You have actual, real competition now. Yes, M$ is annoying, but now your products are in direct competition with other people's products, for the first time ever. You need a new corporate culture.
Because your current corporate culture?
IT FUCKING SUCKS!
Agreed. Fuck news about major companies that actually matter! Bring on the desktop Linux posts so that we can all rehash how much Unity, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 suck and pine for the good old days when they sucked slightly less.
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.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Obviously is google so they'll probably do it right... but anyway: There's pages are seem to be updated every few seconds, with zero actual new content (maybe moving things around). For example, each time I look for some open source program filtering by date (last 24 hours) I'm getting results in softwaretopic.informer.com , regarding that program.
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 from.
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.
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 gives you 3 options when you install it: Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
I8-D
Great, now all eHow has to do is write scripts to update their pages every day, and they will safely stay at the top of EVERY search result.
Here is the line to focus on:
"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
This news story itself isn't bad. Astroturfing is bad.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
i have seen somewhere a search engine that allowed one to block a site from showing again... google should implement this, users can decide what they want and dont want and google should allow that choice
Higuita
I switched to Bing about 6 months ago as I was getting fed up with the link farms and irrelevant results Google search returns. I haven't looked back, really. The only feature of Google search I sometimes miss is filtering by date. Bing only lets you filter by date on some queries, not all. But given Bing's results are better, I find myself needing to filter on date to get decent results much less often, so I haven't missed it much.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My IE doesn't default to Bing. Unless Bing's result to every search I make is a Google result page.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
it did when you installed it. Most people don't change it to google, they just click the 'yeah, let me get on with browsing' button which leaves the bing default in place.
That's the problem. Google sucks and Bling sucks slightly less.
When I type a query into Google it first says 'I don't you're really searching for that, I think you're searching for this instead' and gives me results I didn't ask for. When I manage to convince it that I do know what I'm searching for it then gives me lots of results for the words I searched for with 's' on the end or synonyms of those words or pages which don't even seem to contain those words at all. Or sometimes it greys out the results and doesn't do anything. It steals the page-up/page-down keys that I normally use to scroll the page and instead moves from one search result to the next. It randomly decides to pop up a tiny image of the web page that the search found, which is useless and means my browser is presumably pulling pages from sites that I don't want to visit.
The 'smarter' they try to make the search engine, the more it sucks, because it always tries to give me fifteen million results even if they're not want I'm actually looking for.
But so far I don't see a big difference compared to the other search engines, what has happened is they've made it harder for me to search for stuff.
Used to be when I put in search terms the search results would usually have all my search terms (not always tho- coz googlebombing worked).
Then they changed that so that I would have to prefix the search terms with +, only then would the search results have all my search terms (or at least be googlebombed by/related to all my search terms - e.g. a page with all my search terms pointed to the search result).
Now they've changed things so I have to put a double quote around each and every one of my search terms! I guess they don't like or care about users like me.
It's harder to search for technical stuff when they keep including what they think are synonyms or leave stuff out because there are fewer results or some other stupid reason.
I don't care if there are fewer results, there could be only one result or even zero results. That way I can tell whether the entire indexed web has an answer to my problem or not (which is unfortunately often). If there are really no answers then I can spend the time trying to figure it out myself rather than wasting time wrestling with Google.
Nowadays Google is doing something analogous to including the answers to 2+2 when I just want the answer to 2.123 + 2.12. So what if there's only one correct answer on the web, I don't care. Same if nobody else in the world has worked out the answer.
These users overwhelmingly use Google and switch to Bing will almost certainly alienate these users.
That would hardly register in the noise compared to the alienation caused by Mozilla's own stupid decisions over the last year.
Remember, folks. If someone says something you don't agree with, especially if you possess an emotional attachment to a particular company (e.g., Google), that person is a "shill."
You don't seem to know what "astroturfing" means.
By the way, lots of Google employees post here and on other tech sites. Where is your complaint about that? Reading your journal entry makes you come off as extremely paranoid. You actually claim that MS is "currently running the overwhelming majority of astroturf campaigns on Slashdot," but the fact is that in any article about one of Google's competitors, a mysterious explosion of angry anonymous posts shows up to bash that competitor, especially if it's Apple.
How man people Opt-In to Bing versus it being the default search engine for IE9? My guess is not many. Last time I installed Chrome, it presented an easy interface to choose the default search engine. The last I installed Windows 7, Bing is the default and it's been made increasingly difficult to change the default search engine.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
I'm no big fan of Google (although I don't have a massive hate-on for them, as you do). Also did you look at the guy's post history?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
An employee with a user account is not the same thing as an astroturfer.
Any company running an astroturf campaign using anon accounts is wasting their time.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Let's be realistic here. No one "switches" from Google to Bing. The only reason Bing has any users at all is the same reason why most of Microsoft's products and services have any users at all: it's the default in Windows. People use Bing for the same reason they use IE: their Windows computers came that way and they're either too lazy to change it or aren't aware that there are alternatives.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
That would hardly register in the noise compared to the alienation caused by Mozilla's own stupid decisions over the last year.
True, but they're at the point where people's backs are being broken with each new straw Mozilla adds. Even minor foul-ups are hurting them significantly, because it's just one more thing...,
If bing has anywhere near that number it's because of all of the phones (hell even android phones) coming prepackaged with Bing as the default page and search and locked out or highly hidden ability to change it.
My gf literally can't type an address in and goes to bing then types google.com to do searches/address entry.
If Bing ever actually provided better results, I'd start using it. It is still pretty laughably bad, Microsoft is just playing off the naivety of every average joe consumer on a windows 7 pc that doesn't know what IE even is, let alone that they use it. I also wonder if google intentionally turns off search mechanics to lessen server burden from queries, and now they have to turn some of them back on to keep people from experimenting with Bing. But again, experimentation isn't really the problem - its the extreme ignorance of the average PC user (and it isn't their fault really) as to what search engines are, what browsers are, etc. They have limited scopes of understanding that are being exploited with IE, and theres nothing wrong with Microsoft having IE use bing - or to have it the default browser on Windows. If people buy the product, they get what they buy. Microsoft just gives them all their services as the defaults. Its the users responsibility to change them if they don't like them, and apparently people are "fine enough" with Bing not to switch back.
Google is now intercepting their links with a redirect. So I can no longer right click a link and save, and I have to allow websites to redirect me which I don't like. Also Google has a more granular tracking of which websites I go to. All of these things are not good.
When Yahoo started doing this, I stopped using them. Now that Google is doing this, I'm going to Bing. Bing is good enough for 80% of my searches. The other 20% ... probably to back to Google's mobile site, which doesn't redirect.
User-agent: bingbot
Disallow: /
I did that because the URL given by their crawler, http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm doesn't go to a page about their crawler.
removal (yes removal) of the ability to force results to include a search term can only have been done for marketing reasons. I'm surprised no-one has realized this.
Search market share seems not to be affected much by search quality. In early 2008, Yahoo was the first search engine to add a group of special purpose subengines for weather, stocks, celebrities, and such. Nobody noticed. Yahoo's market share did not improve. After about six months, Google copied that idea. Now all the search engines have similar "verticals", often offering their own in-house content.
Because users aren't that sensitive to search quality, Google can optimize search results for revenue. Google has a monkey on their back: the bottom-feeder sites that exist for AdSense traffic. 94% of Google revenue is ads. 30% of that is AdSense. We measure 36% of AdSense domains as "bottom feeders". If Google fixed their search quality problems, their revenue would drop maybe 10%.
Bing doesn't have that problem. They run ads on search result pages, but their third-party program only started recently and is little used. Bing is probably driving more revenue to Google AdSense sites than to their own third-party ads. Bing could get much tougher on web spam if they chose. Until recently, they've mostly tried to match Google's results, but lately they've been going beyond that.
Incidentally, adding "social" inputs makes search worse, not better. Social inputs are too heavily spammed.
I am giving duckduckgo a try, they seem to be better at giving you the results for what you actually typed in.
They also say (who knows if that's true), that they do not track searches, and do not keep records.
https://www.duckduckgo.com/
I had it as the default search engine in firefox for about a week now, it seems to work fine.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duck-duck-go-ssl-search-plugin/
A couple searches did not give me the result I was looking for, so I used the feedback link, and they got in touch with me very quickly, and they fixed the problem (as it turns out, there was a wrong link on wikipedia which they valued too much).
I like the fact that Google and Bing use different ranking approaches, and use both depending on what I'm looking for. Google tends to do a better job of finding technical articles, FAQs, and manuals, while Bing tends to do better at finding news.
Both are pretty bad at finding official government legislation and paperwork.
If all the search engines were to return the same results, what would be the point of competition?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Try duckduckgo.
In other words the competition is pushing innovation just as it should. I'd never use bing but I'm happy they exist so google has someone to fight with. Move along....
It might just be Australia, but I get much better results with Google than Bing. To quote a conversation between two fellow colleages "no wonder you can't find it, shop using Bing. It's s**t". Enough said.
AC
I am so sick of having tweeter posts and news items pop up when I'm doing *most* searches... some searches I find it valuable... how about this Google, if it's on the front page of CNN or FoxNews, take your pick, then show it in the search results... otherwise this just leads to Twitter spam.
The + operator used to be reliable on Google, including ONLY pages that HAD THE TWO OR THREE GODDAMN WORDS I'M LOOKING FOR.
Now, it seems to ignore the + operator, and just gives me "here's a page with this word, here's a page with that word, here's a page that only had two out of the five words you wanted".
Shitty, Google.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
I was just fixing an issue on my mother's computer and I noticed that a program she had installed had switched her default search engine to Bing. I asked her about it and she said "Yes! Please switch it back! I don't know why it keeps putting me on that website!"
When I updated my bit-torrent client (Vuze), it tried to pull the same stunt. They get you in the habit of clicking "yes" by popping up a series EULA's that nobody reads, then hopes you won't notice when the last one is a Bing Bar that will change your default search engine. You don't even have a choice between yes/or, just "continue". If you didn't uncheck the "please install this for me" box before you hit continue, then you get a lovely piece of junkware at no cost and Microsoft writes another check.
They famously bought Yahoo's customers, and now they're in negotiations to buy Firefox's customers when Google's deal runs out. In short, Bing bleeds money left and right, as Microsoft continues to buy market share. I can't help but wonder, however, what's the point? Is this really a long-term viable strategy? At some point, shouldn't Bing actaully *make* money rather than costing money? I guess every dollar Microsoft flushes down the toilet is one less dollar for Google to earn, but this doesn't seem like a very smart business strategy in the long run.
considering it is force installed as a service on Verizon Android phones, that adds a skew to the numbers. You have to ROOT the damn phone to get rid of Bing. I have a G'zOne Commando and since Bing was removed it goes up to a day and a half on a charge not just half a day.
After Google's veterans day page was Tetris and Bing's was an American flag.
They're slipping because MS is using IE over Netscape tactics. I mostly work on macs where its easy to choose/use google search. Occasionally I'm at a PC and its a total PITA to not use Bing so most people just go with the flow. It has nothing to do with choice.
Interesting point. Maybe. I imagine most people who use Firefox are regular users who hardly care what search engine they use, but I have no data to back up that intuition. In the tech community, though, I agree: Microsoft is disliked enough that it would alienate tech-savvy users to swap the default, even if it's very easy to change.
What's "Bing" again... Oh yeah I remember, looked at it once when it came up as a default setting... Haven't seen it since.
Bing is hopeless trying to find anything useful on Microsoft's own web sites....
Most people can't change their default browser start page let alone change their default search engine. Ignorance is more to blame than loosing share to a good search engine. 33% of the 35% are the ones too ignorant to know how to change their default search engine. Truth is Bing is a POS full of crapware snags.
For folks that are interested, the original blog post about our freshness change is here: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html