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Bing Now Nearly As Good As Google — Says Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Harry Shum, who oversees research and development for Microsoft's Bing search engine, believes his company has now matched Google's ability to build software platforms that can harness the power of tens of thousands of servers. — 'For many years, we've really tried to play the catch-up game,' Shum says. 'And now we feel that after a lot of effort, we understand search quality problems better than before, and that if you look at Google and Bing, the quality is beginning to be very comparable.' While his comments might be a little biased, many people do share the same opinion. How do you feel about Bing's search results compared to Google's? For example DuckDuckGo, the privacy oriented search engine, uses Bing's back-end and has gained a small following on Slashdot."
Google is much more serious about search than Microsoft; I have access to Google Scholar, Google Books and several specialized searches that may or may not be useful to you personally, like Reader and blogs.
Also, Google gets me much better results in Image search, than Bing, and generally better results from web searches.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Bing-o. Google search sucks now that they've made it 'smart', so if Bing isn't even as good as that, it really must suck.
My experience is that Bing has generally been better for technical searches because it doesn't try to 'help' by replacing my acronyms with words that are similar and so common that they completely overwhelm the things I'm actually searching for.
Startpage is great, and unlike duckduckgo it used googles back end which I find delivers better results
Is this an astro-turf? Did you not read that duckduckgo.com is using Bing as a backend? Do you realize you just anonymously gave two advertisements for Microsoft?
On the other hand, if you think Bing is really as good as Google, I'd be really interested in your reasons, instead of some vague ideas about evilness.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I scrolled down a long way and didn't get anything that looked even vaguely like the link you describe. Are you sure it wasn't the advert link (easy to spot, because it's on a yellow background and says 'sponsored link' next to it). For me, this time, that link was to a German company that offers Linux support, but I can well imagine it would be Microsoft on another search.
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verbatim is a google feature. GP was praising google, not bing.
As soon as Google started requiring me to use Javascript in order to see my search results I started to use Bing.
Except it doesn't. There seems to be quite a lot of AC "bing is great" comments on this story - astroturfing a little?
That looks a lot like nginx running on Ubuntu.
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Searching yourself is a really stupid idea. It provides a key for advertisers and other scam artists to amass personalized information about you in one fell swoop and link it to your machine ID and IP addresses. Once these are sold, you are a sitting duck for identity theft.
All that your experiment says is that google is way ahead of bing in commoditizing your identity.
Visiting DDG with NoScript enabled gives this page:
Settings
Load/Reset Settings
This page requires JavaScript and cookies to function properly. However, neither are required to change settings. You can use URL parameters instead of this page. Just set your homepage like this to use your current settings:
You can also load settings from a URL parameter string. Or reset all settings. If you want to turn off JavaScript altogether, try out our HTML and lite versions.
Does this help at all?
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
There is DuckDuckGo's privacy policy which is really it's raison d'Ãtre. But obviously it needs to have good search capabilities as well, or else you won't use it.
And DuckDuckGo does have some good things about it. For example, I searched for, with the quotation marks, "first- and second-century" on Google yesterday. Received a lot of hits with "first and second century". Okay, I thought quotation marks are supposed to deliver exact hits? In fact Google's support page says: "By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change." Without any change? Apparently not. Well, whatever. So go to the sidebar, click on "More search options", turn on "Verbatim" (since I do not keep any cookies between sessions, this is not a "set it and forget it" thing). Slightly different results, but still mostly "first and second century". So what now? I don't even know. I just gave up and went to DuckDuckGo: Every result that I saw had exactly the phrase searched for.
But Google has their Books search and Google Scholar which are both immensely useful to me.
Mirosoft confessed that Bing is worse than Google. Who'd a thunk it?
Some here might say "Bing is even worse than Google", of course.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That's probably a load balancer rather than an actual web server you're hitting.
And even if you don't personally use it, they also:
Frankly, I worry about the dangers of their data collection, and I'll probably move away from some of their services because of that, but I still like them as a whole.
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Why do all of this when you can just opt out of ad personalization or delete your search history?
Meant to reply to your post, but replied to the AC instead. Anyhow, there's always the DuckDuckGo architecture page if you want some additional information.
I use nginx for load balancing, proxy, and back end application serving tasks. Works great for all of the above.
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