Slashdot Mirror
Bing Search Overtakes Yahoo
SharkLaser writes "Microsoft's Bing search engine has overtaken Yahoo for the first time. While both Bing, Yahoo and a bunch of meta-search engines like the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo use Bing's back-end, it clearly shows Yahoo's declining market share. comScore has also released its search data for 2011 — overall, Bing gained 3.1% of market share while Yahoo lost 1.5% and Google lost 0.7%. Yahoo's new CEO Scott Thompson has lots of work to do."
That thing still has a search engine?
Here's how I have contributed:
I used to employ Google for all kinds of web searches, but over the last few month's, I realized (by accident), that Bing's video search returns were better presented (but not necessarily more relevant) than Google's.
Particularly, I have come to love Bing's playing of the videos when the mouse is hovered over them. Google has nothing close! Google should watch out.
That's a great feature in Bing, actually. Especially if looking for more adult material. Another thing is that Google has really crapped their design lately. It relies heavily on javascript and they've gone and hidden the cached link in the side panel that opens when you hover it. It's slow and clumsy. Same thing happened to their image search. It's sad because Google always took pride in providing clear, useful interface, but not anymore. I guess they get more ad clicks by frustrating users who use the normal search.
MS is making inroads through partnerships, interesting presentation of search results(like video searches), and putting using Bing as the default in their OS (just like they did with IE). However, I still get better results with Google over Bing even when looking for stuff on microsoft.com. It really becomes frustrating when you are on a MS site and can't find something (that you know exists) because the site's search tool is powered by Bing. Yes, Google needs competition but Bing isn't it. Sad for MS but true.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I think the only thing keeping Yahoo in the Search market are the various software packages that try to push the Yahoo Toolbar during install, and ISPs that use it as the their default Homepage during setup.
I like the image search, too. I started using Bing when Google+ came out and every website wanted to have me report to Google through a javascript tied to google.com, but blocking google.com meant search became really lame, so I started using Bing and sandboxed Google into Chrome. I find Bing's results to be better on obscure searches where Gooogle hasn't had someone pick out the best result already, but for most searches Bing is not quite there, but it is getting there. On a side note, I had never used Chrome before, so in 2011 I contributed to the increase in users using Bing and Chrome, however, Firefox is still my regular browser and I use Google and Bing about equally.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Yeah, that's not paranoid at all. There's a much higher change that users would change to Google instead of Bing, and since Microsoft gets paid for the Yahoo deal, why would they deliberately shoot themselves in to leg?
I think the only thing keeping Yahoo in the Search market are the various software packages that try to push the Yahoo Toolbar during install, and ISPs that use it as the their default Homepage during setup.
Google is changing that though, as they're been heavily pushing Chrome with software installs, OEM's and ISPs. So instead of Yahoo toolbar or Bonzi Buddy, you now get Chrome when you install some software. How delightful.
Sales for the Zune have overtaken sales for the Sony Walkman.
...people who use Bing to find Yahoo! before doing their search, or people who use Bing to find Google to find Yahoo! before doing their search?
Cross post for a pic from reddit.com
There's always a reason why people still prefer using Google. The only reason why I can see people using Bing or Yahoo is because that's the default engine on their web browser or something like that.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
I would put money on a large proportion of their searches being 'google'.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Yahoo LOSES customers with Bing results, whereas Bing GAINS customers, with the SAME RESULT DATA. So immediately I'd want to make sure it is the same they serve, and at the same speed.
Also note that Microsofts 'cost of revenue' increased due to the Yahoo deal, as though Microsoft paid Yahoo to get that traffic and to be able to serve adverts to them.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-01-27/tech/30087727_1_bing-default-search-engine-microsoft
So yeh, I would check carefully if Microsoft are screwing Yahoo over, because leopards and spots, but also because if Microsoft gets even half of Yahoo's lost customers it sames money on the Yahoo deal and gains direct users of Bing.
So, how much of this swing away from Google is due to the seriously annoying things they have done recently including, but not limited to, Google Instant (seriously annoying), Google Preview (irritating and annoying) and screwing over the gmail interface.
As for the third, in this day and age there is no excuse.
As for the first two... I use other search engines in places where I can't disable google instant and google preview. I find both of them so annoying that I waste more time disabling them than actually using the search engine. The interface gets in the way of the function. Yes, there are ways to ignore and bypass these irritations.. but why I am wasting effect on doing so?
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
How much would you like to put? There is also 7,5 million monthly searches in Google for 'bing'.
Getting the astroturfing in early.
That's a high five moment for Ballmer right up there with the Zune out-selling one or two unbranded, generic mp3 players.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I doubt even MS can keep this up - they have to buy vast quantities of their traffic. Whilst there's probably a bit more left in the budget (which of course they hope will take them to the tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining), if they aren't careful, they'll run out of money and be back on the decline.
I know this isn't the whole shibang, but: http://www.xbox360digest.com/2010/09/22/earn-microsoft-points-with-bing/
might have helped a bit.
You're a fucking moron DCTech/NorthKorea/CmdrPony/whoever-else-you-are.
Yeah. [insert thing here] isn't bad - for proof, just look at all those people raping and killing people!
When you actually look at MS business practices, you see them being the sleaze of the earth. "you have to smile when you pull the trigger", etc. Assholes. Assholes that you admire, obviously.
tl;dr You're a fucking moron.
which is totally what she said
Something you should note, digest and accept.
Just because Pol Pot didn't kill as many as Hitler or Stalin or Mao doesn't mean he should get a pass for his evil acts.
Neither should Microsoft because of other companies acting badly.
I believe the way the cache links and hover to view a preview are now there like thatto so google can say it takes user action to get those to show up so google is not technically infringing copyright, the user is requesting it, etc. Kinda annoying really.
I've contributed as well, but unwittingly as a result of msn.com's misleading "Feature Story" links. Each link is not really an article, but rather a pre-canned Bing search. This sort of practice has got to be skewing results, since people who click these links did not necessarily intend to use Bing.
I can google that. Nevermind! :P
Why are you calling me a moron when answering an AC? Besides, Microsoft hardly did anything evil. Both Apple and Google are being much more evil now a days. Gee, your OS comes with a browser so you don't need to ftp to some address you don't even know to get a browser. Outrageous!
"I have come to love Bing's playing of the videos when the mouse is hovered over them."
If only Yahoo! News could incorporate that so the videos, that are always "no longer available", show that message instead of users having to wait through an advertisement and 12 cookies. Sadly, advertisements and cookies are the only 2 things that seem to work properly on Yahoo! any longer. IMHO of course.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
And even more importantly those videos come directly from Bing so they bypass webfilters.
Because you constantly switch your main account, and you probably use AC too.
I don't care about the browser coming with the OS thing, I care about the stuff that I bothered to post a month or two ago but can't be arsed repeating to you. The management culture in MS in the 90s was demonstrated as completely rotten, and Ballmer is still in charge. Nothing has changed apart from they have to watch their step more. Both MS and Intel have used their monopoly positions to try to scare their clients into not dealing with competitors.
which is totally what she said
No one chooses Bing (ok some do but not many). People use Bing because their WindowsUpdate updated their browser from IEx to IEy and it changed the default search engine to Bing and the user never even noticed. I say this because, as an IT professional, every single user's PC I have ever seen with Bing as the default search engine, the user still thinks they're using Google. They simply don't pay attention to anything that's going on in front of their own eyes.
Bing is not gaining market share by being good - it's gaining it because MS is using their OS monopoly to "trick" users into using Bing. I say this as someone who generally likes Microsoft, too. When it comes to someone changing my browsers settings - any of them - without asking me, I get really pissed off.
Not exactly.
That's a great feature in Bing, actually. Especially if looking for more adult material.
so Bing is the porn search engine of choice?
gives "let me Bing that for you" a whole different meaning.
who'd have thought Bing Crosby and Bing surfboards were that popular!
Unless they're searching for Carmella Bing, as I'm told that Bing is the best porn search engine :)
I wonder if Bing's increasing market share is due in any way to their increasingly maddening lock-up of IE's search behaviour in Windows 7.
I helped my father-in-law get a new Dell machine up and running over the Christmas break and was seriously astonished at how many steps are required now to make Google the default search agent in IE rather than Bing. A novice user has effectively no chance to avoid using Bing.
I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been more backlash against it, but I guess this shit is less likely to fly outside USA.
Clearly as the same search back end is being used by both bing and yahoo it has nothing to do with the search results. Back in the 90s I stopped using yahoo. There were a few reason and one was the main search page was cluttered an ugly and googles was not. I think this is still true. Bing's growth probably has a lot to do with being the default search in MS products and the yahoo search page looking like it came from1996 doesn't help matters. That yahoo logo is a piece of junk that looks like it was made with MS word art.
Google's pulled a lot of dumb moves recently. It used to be that if you disabled instant search you could get your search bar back at the bottom of the search results page. Now it's just gone permanently. You have no choice but to scroll back to the top of the page to change your query. Google says this is by design; they want you to use instant search, so you can just hit backspace and edit your search query string from anywhere on the page. But half the time I can't remember exactly what I typed, so I still have to scroll back up. And even then that's only if I can stand instant search. Bing, on the other hand, presents the traditional results page thank goodness.
Things like this combined with Google's increasing inability to return relevant results (their results are poisoned by link aggregators and years-old irrelevant results), is likely driving more than a few people away.
I am surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet, but post-Christmas and the Fall update for the XBox, I would wonder how many more searches were driven by additional traffic from the Bing search from XBox, especially the voice search via Kinect. I think that would amount to a very sizable increase alone, because I still don't know, like most posters, anyone who goes to bing.com via browser deliberately for a search.
And, to compete against Bing, "lots of work to do" means to create an OS running on the vast majority of the world's workstations, bundle a web browser that's used by default and "can't be removed from the operating system" and make their search engine the default in the search box or if you make a typo in the address bar.
Make no mistake, I'm not fan of Yahoo but the rise of Bing is certainly not due to the quality of its search results, real or imagined.
Does this really have anything to do with the quality of Bing search results and people choosing it or, as I suspect, is this just a side effect of Bing being the default search engine in Internet Explorer?
I've also noticed that it's harder than it used to be to change IE over to Google as the default search engine.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
After long ago abandoning Alta Vista for Google, I've recently found myself compelled to return, for one simple reason; Google try too hard to tell me what I'm looking for.
What I mean is this, Google are not content to let me tell them what I want to find. Their search algorithms now completely discount my use of quotation marks to group words, or to try to indicate that I really want whatever unlikely word I enter. Many of the old tricks for hinting to the search engine that you mean what you say are now ignored entirely. On Alta Vista, powered by Yahoo! (and therefore by Bing, I guess) those tricks still work.
When I perform technical term searches, which is much of what I do, I don't need the search engine second guessing my spelling. If Google would let me override their "corrections" I would continue to use them.
All opinions expressed are mine, if you want them it'll cost you.
Do you refer to people using Windows 3.1?
I looked at exact match data (ie. [bing] ), not broad. There really is 7.5 million searches for "bing". If you look at broad search (so that it includes things like Bing Crosby), then there's 16.6 million searches.
Other bing related searches:
[bing maps] 1,000,000
[bing.com] 450,000
[bing translator] 201,000
[www.bing.com] 135,000
[bing games] 135,000
[bing travel] 110,000
[bing images] 90,500
[bing map] 74,000
[bing search] 60,500
[bing video] 27,100
[www.bing] 27,100
[live search] 22,200
[bing videos] 18,100
[bing toolbar] 12,100
[bing rewards] 12,100
etc....
And these are search requests per month, with these exact terms, on Google. People are obviously searching for and wanting to use Bing.
Sorry, but no. Microsoft is still as of today essentially mugging people (both device makers and by extension their buyers) by charging for the FAT patents.
The damn patent consists essentially on converting "longfilename.txt" to "LONGFI~1.TXT" - behold the innovation! - and for that they are able to extort any organization that wants to work with their monopolist OS (which was in large part gained through shady deals with OEMs).
Dilbert RSS feed
Or because Verizon forces Bing to be the default search on all Android phones they sell, with no way to uninstall it or change it. (Without rooting the phone)
I use to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
All they do is pay software publishers to change the default search on someone's browsers unknowingly. Or do it themselves when they release a new version of IE. That has to account for at least 90% of their growth.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cripple+fight
Dude that was 19 fucking 96, get a life, seriously. I doubt you'd even be able to find 10 people still there from that era and all the main guys have been gone the better part of a decade. And if you are delusional enough to think that Steve "Whatever Apple is doing make a half assed copy NOW" Ballmer is some Darth Vader type get some help, okay? you are a perfect example of treating corporations as ballclubs to cheer or boo like its pro wrestling, but newsflash, they're just companies. And everyone that was at that company then is long gone now. What's next, you gonna go bitch at Steve jobs headstone for killing the newton back in 97? Maybe complain about CueCats and Comet Cursors?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Bing User Here
While I still believe that Google delivers slightly more relevant results for the more obscure queries I would say in general the results are on par between the services. I switched from Google as default to Bing because as far as presentation goes Bing is just better. When I search for sports teams Bing will give me schedule and record in a nice display at the top of the results. Last week I was thinking about heading up the hill to go skiing so I typed in "big sky resort" and what is at the top before the results? The snow report current conditions and basic status. For image and video searches I think if you try them you will prefer Bing to Google. I feel like recently Bing is simply trying harder to innovate and improve than Google; which as the underdog, is exactly what they should be doing.
Or some equally inane marketing bullshit
I interviewed a half dozen Yahoo employees while I worked for "another" search engine company. I asked them why they were leaving. Four of them said (basically) that it was because Yahoo doesn't care about engineers or ideas, just eyeballs and money. If your project doesn't show good numbers, no matter how much better the user experience might be if it was adopted, your project will languish or be canceled. One guy mentioned that his group's hardware was cast-off servers from around the dotcom era, and they couldn't get new hardware because they were infrastructure or something. The marketing types handled the budget.
Contrast this with that other search engine company, which once gave an engineer a 5-day paid Hawaii vacation because he figured out how to make searches a tenth of a second faster.
Anyway, I don't know if what the interviewees said was true, but it made sense. They wanted to work at a place that was driven by ideas and technology, not marketing.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I upgraded my wifes vista laptop to IE9, the only download for I was a Bing/MSN branded one. Her homepage got changed to msn.com. The search box on msn.com is bing (obviously). Before the upgrade it had explicitly been set to yahoo
With all the recent G+ shenanigans I'm going to change my browser's default search to Bing for a week and see how it goes. I'll add a link-bar shortcut to Google in case I'm not happy with any particular search, but I have the "go to the search box" keyboard shortcut so totally ingrained in my muscle memory that it'll take conscious effort to use Google.
I'm not saying I'll quit Google forever, because what if MS does something sleazy soon, but competition is supposed to make things better for all of us, so for now, I'll go wherever it's best.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Wow. I guess after you dig past all the "news", "email", "groups", "ads", and "other crap" they still have search.
How Quaint.
-
This is exactly what I was talking about. You can tell when a marketer is running a company versus an engineer.
so Bing is the porn search engine of choice?
- don't be so dismissive of the killer application for the entire Internet.
You can't handle the truth.
Since you've been moderated "troll" by an obviously paid Microsoft shill, I'll let them waste some more mod points modding me down, too. You said "So, a shitty useless search engine overtakes a lame search engine. No wonder Yahoo is so useless it uses Bing." I agree completely.
The only person I know who uses Yahhoo is my 83 year old mother. I don't know anyone who uses Bing, for obvious reasons (it's second rate crapware).
Now go on, shill, mod me "troll" because you diasgree with my OPINION (and obviously not just mine, the parent poster's as well).
Free Martian Whores!
A news item about Yahoo! and Bing has an icon of Google. That says a lot.
Nothing has been proved
My hatred for Bing could also stem from the fact that it was necessary to ROOT my Android phone in order to uninstall BING.
...so Bing surpasses itself as Yahoo search. In other news Google has surpassed AltaVista. And to rock the boat: Bing still is inferior to Google for search. Half of the stuff the video search indexes are YouTube videos as well for which I could go straight to YouTube and search from there.
Society use your Sciences
Ballmer is still there, and as soon as their antitrust oversight was over, there were articles of MS using scummy tactics again. Let's wait and see what happens to Nokia.
which is totally what she said
Yahoo definitely needs to clean up the main landing page. They should talk to the mail design and UI people.
I've never been a Yahoo fan, but it's nearly getting under my skin how good the UI for Yahoo mail has gotten in the past year or so. It sucks just a bit because my Yahoo account is the one I use for anywhere I think my address will be spidered, sold or spammed. Seriously, the UI is gorgeous and extremely functional. It kills Gmail and OWA and even Thunderbird and Outlook in ease of use. Too bad it gets nearly as much spam as my retired hotmail account once did.
Just to keep M$ and Google competitive, I hope they develop more towards competing with Google Docs and Office 365 and try to go after more lucrative small and medium business hosting contracts.
So then how come negative "opinions" on linux are modded as troll ? Do you call that "shilling" for commercial linux companies? Its easy to ignore bias if you already agree with that position.
Sorry, but no. Microsoft is still as of today essentially mugging people (both device makers and by extension their buyers) by charging for the FAT patents.
The damn patent consists essentially on converting "longfilename.txt" to "LONGFI~1.TXT" - behold the innovation! - and for that they are able to extort any organization that wants to work with their monopolist OS (which was in large part gained through shady deals with OEMs).
And, of course, there is absolutely no alternative to using FAT or indeed Windows.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Pity that Tech Crunch has chosen to refer to comScore, which notoriously overestimates the market share of Microsoft products, in this article, which obviously deals only with search-engine market share in the United States. If, instead, we look at StatCounter's statistics, we can see that worldwide, Google is sailing along at over 90 % with no discernable dips, while neither Bing nor Yahoo! make it up to 4 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-daily-20080701-20120113). According to the same source, in the United States, Google commands over 80 % of the search market, while neither Yahoo ! nor Bing reach up till 10 % (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20080701-20120113).... Henri
If you're a device maker, you can't choose what OS your clients use nor what filesystem such OS will support.
Besides, if I decide to walk through a bad neighborhood instead of paying for a cab and get mugged, is the thief not guilty because I could have taken the cab?
Dilbert RSS feed
Here's another reason - they played a snippet from SNL on the radio this morning, a Jimmy Fallon parody of David Bowie, "Tebowie". It was funny so I googled for an mp3 of it; there were videos but no MP3. So I search from BitTorrent, and a Bing page comes up, with few of the results having anything to do with Fallon, Bowie, or Tebow. No MP3s and no Tebowie at all.
I'm starting to believe that nobody uses Bing on purpose. The only way anybody gets there is from companies MS has paid. It's disgusting.
Free Martian Whores!
I'd say they're just fanboys, and modding someone down for not liking Linux is as bad as modding someone down for not liking Windows, unless it's just retarded (like "You Windows lusers don't even have a CLI" when in fact it's always had a CLI available).
It's possible that RedHat does employ shills; I have no clue. But some of the marketspeak comments about Windows (and other software companies as well) are obviously shills. Or maybe not, maybe they're just fools who swallow that marketspeak they saw elsewhere.
Free Martian Whores!
Yes. This.
I should have included a mention of the removal of + with the replacement of " " - it drives me nuts.
Although, I am finding their 'natural language search' "feature" to be more irritating. You search for key words including 'website' and it returns results including 'web' and 'site' .. but I know I am looking for "website".
Also, I've found that dissimilar searches.. are returning very similar search results. It is like google has cached the original search.. and is now throwing half of the original search results at me for the second search.. where I can't see how those hits would be included in the search search. Very very strange behaviour.
I miss +
"The new way" "doesn't" seem to "do the same thing".
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.