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."

Comments

Compared to Bing, Google is still king:

[blind biker]

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.

Re:Holy self-reference!

[philip.paradis]

pparadis::palegray-mobile { ~ }-> curl --head http://duckduckgo.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 18:26:58 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 4485
Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:24:13 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:26:58 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=21600
Accept-Ranges: bytes

pparadis::palegray-mobile { ~ }-> telnet duckduckgo.com 22
Trying 184.72.106.52...
Connected to duckduckgo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.3p1 Debian-3ubuntu7
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.

That looks a lot like nginx running on Ubuntu.

Re:Holy self-reference!

[PReDiToR]

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?

Re:anecdotally....

[icebraining]

And even if you don't personally use it, they also:

• Pay people like Rob Pike, Guido Van Rossum and many more to develop OSS languages and compilers like Python, Go and V8
• Offer codecs like WebM again as OSS with a patent grant
• Pay a bunch of students every year to work on OSS projects

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.

Re:Holy self-reference!

[philip.paradis]

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.