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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."
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.
Definitely for paywalled research indexing sites its quite annoying that Google pushes all the paywalled stuff to the top by matching to their summary, while the actual document (a pdf or ps) that you actually want to read can also be found non-paywalled at some *.edu but its nowhere to be found on the first page of results.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
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