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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."
Since discovering the verbatim feature for Google, the search works once more. Most of my searches are now done with it enabled.
But whilst G+, Maps, Image search are all as well integrated and continue to work better, both in accuracy of things I want, and speed to get them, why would I bother to change to something that's /almost/ as good. Plus, having saved searches available on the phone to check something after searching on the laptop has been more useful than I thought it'd be. So why use Bing on desktop and Google on phone? Makes no sense.
For now, Google's still the best for what I need it to do.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
And while we're at it, would DuckDuckGo's "small following on Slashdot" please enter and sign in with a few posts?
I've been using DuckDuckGo for some time, primarily for the privacy and lack of filtering based on my previous queries (finding political articles that are *not* slanted toward my bias, for example). However, during this time I've discovered that if I really need to find an answer to something I'm entering a `!google' into my search (which forces DuckDuckGo to use Google). :-\
Life is short; think quickly.
Describing Google as Evil and Microsoft as the better alternative to that seems a little suspect to me. There seems to be a fairly widespread ant-Google campaign going on, and the prevalence of it versus anything they've actually done lately seems extremely out of balance ... almost as if it were being promoted by their competition. FaceBook was caught funding it once .ii I would doubt they or others would drop their plans so quickly. I'm not saying people are annoyed by Google's behaviour, I just think there's a non-grassroots push behind the vast majority of it.
I just tried bing on a list of sample (obscure, complicated) queries that are relevant to me, personally. google found the correct page in 3 out of 4. bing got 1 out of 4.
I wouldn't make any grandiose claims on a sample size of 4. But from a "quick and dirty check" perspective, I won't be trying bing again anytime soon.
BTW: since when are vendor competitiveness claims newsworthy? It always annoys me when stories like this show up on slashdot. Yes, the high-powered $vendor_X executive whose livelihood depends on $product_X has publically claimed that it is equivalent. This is a story? I don't care which vendor you're talking about: the vendor's own claims about relative competitiveness are not newsworthy. Wait for an (impartial) third party to declare that $vendor_X's products, which historically were viewed as inferior to $vendor_Y, are now equal or superior. Or wait for $vendor_X to announce a new feature. Then you have a story.
they finished scarfing down Google's search database, and are just working on fine tuning what percent of false negatives to return?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yes microsoft is evil as well, but they don't own 80-90% of web services at the moment.
While I'm no Google fanboy, I recognize that it's a company that gives me not only search results in exchange for my information/attention. It also gives me a fairly good browser, a useful map system and a decent smartphone OS. It was also, if I recall correctly, the first to implement a free web-based office suite and huge inbox storage capacity (2Gb while Hotmail was still limited to 2Mb or 10Mb - I forget). So that's why I use it - someone will use my search information and, frankly, my search history is not the kind of personal information I care about giving away. So I let Google have it and help finance some good products and technologies. Microsoft, on the other hand, rarely gives anything for free, and when they do, it's usually crap. So even if they were equal in terms of search effectiveness, I'd still use Google. For search. Not that I'll ever use Google+, because my personal information I actually care about giving away.
There seems to be a fairly widespread ant-Google campaign going on, and the prevalence of it versus anything they've actually done lately seems extremely out of balance
Thank you for saying it.
I've grown wary of Google, but so far I have not yet seen a reason to actually distrust them. For MS, on the other hand, I can't find a reason not to.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
To be fair to the parent my very first reaction to the article was to jump on Bing and type "Linux" into the search field to see if it still directed to Microsoft's results first.
Looks like they've cleaned up their act, but the parent is right. For the longest time the search was horrendously biased towards Microsoft products and services.