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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."
I had submissions rejected in the past for referencing Slashdot in them. Have the rules changed?
And while we're at it, would DuckDuckGo's "small following on Slashdot" please enter and sign in with a few posts?
Another alternative is duckduckgo.com, trying that out lately, seems to be alright...
How about Startpage for browsing?
Passionately Indifferent
...as a lowering in standards. Slashdot is now all about the paid astro-turfing, self-referential brand-building, and manufactured outrages designed to generate pageviews. The founders are gone, and It's Time to Start Running This Like a Business, Goddammit!
Since discovering the verbatim feature for Google, the search works once more. Most of my searches are now done with it enabled.
"Nearly as good" like "not good as"?
Personally, I started using Bing once Google became incapable of trying to correct my every search. Google, unless my search query is "HowdoIfixmyspacebar," maybe you should consider all those missing spaces as intentional?
But then, I don't have any taste anyway.
As soon as Google started requiring me to use Javascript in order to see my search results I started to use Bing. I haven't looked back since.
Thank goodness "search" is (now) a fungible commodity. Google better start smartening up if it wants to be relevant in the near future. Companies can't rely on the ignorant masses to forever stay ignorant of the competition and their immoral privacy policies.
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.
staredown?
-- no sig today
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.
I see no difference between the two search engines. However I like Bing presents a beautiful picture everyday. It's unobtrusive. The only time I use Google is to check my Gmail. I stopped using Google when Google link my Youtube to Google and killed all of my Youtube settings. Since both are the same, I rather not support Google for giving me a hard time. Like some has posted earlier, search engine is just a commodity. Google seem to go out of its ways to pissed of long time customers.
in EU we have ballot screen, so nobody knows what "Bing" is and there is little desire to find out.
839*929
Somewhat OT, but I was a DDG user not long ago until switching to Startpage. With the latter I get Google-based searches while avoiding at least some of G's privacy invasions. And their optional proxy is cool. I wasn't aware that DDG was using Bing. I would think that M$ and Google would not be happy with these alternative services leeching off them.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
I recently switched to Bing, 'cause my Google search settings kept forcing Instant Results on me even though my settings have it turned off. That was so annoying, I started using Bing after a month of fighting with the Google settings. So though the search results themselves might be almost as good, I find the overall experience better. Google's losing me over the past several months, and I was a huge Gman.
Bing doesn't give me the results I expect yet.
I tried the ultimate test to compare both search engines: ego-surfing. When I google for my last name, my homepages are displayed first. When I use bing, my mom's linkedin page is on the top of the list. And she doesn't even know what linkedin is, and how come she have a an account there! Epic fail!
All in all, I'd say that googling myself works much better than binging myself.
bing is not getting better, google is getting worst simple as that... with so many programmers here how come we are not building our own search engine, I just don't get it.
I think it is good advice to you never to use the word "never" when referring to technology issues.
Who knew that Microsoft or Nokia or even Apple would be in their respective positions when it comes to technology, just a few years ago? Surely, two of the companies I mention did not see it coming!
Bing has gotten better. A year ago, it couldn't even search its own website (search for WP7 dev kit yielded nothing on the first two pages), yet Google did. Now their own website shows up!
Anyway, it's not surprising that Bing is getting more like Google, since they are actively copying Google.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As more and more people have focused on 'winning' the search results on google, I've gotten more and more 'wrong' results there. Bing has caught up with the google of today, and sadly neither can compete with the google of 4 years ago.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
i was not aware that there was any sort of feedback mechanism.
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.
It's not very hard to be "as good as Google" if you're copying their search results...
Mr. Ballmer wishes to believe that this will be the year of Bing On The Desktop.
I propose that we in the linux community dispatch a team of our disappointment-hardened counselors in order to help him work through the stages of the inevitable grieving process in an efficient and healthy manner...
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
Rule of Acquisition 239 says: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
I wouldn't want to see an internet where Microsoft had the controlling share of the search market. I've had enough of them attempting to destroy the market while they controlled the desktop (and I'm still dealing with that).
I use Microsoft's products where it's appropriate and/or necessary, but avoid them where it's anything close to a judgement call. I'm certainly not going to help them gain a new monopoly where they don't currently have one. Keeping them hungry is probably good for the competitive environment.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The different algorithms used by each search engine impart a unique "flavor" to the results. So when talking about how good a search engine is, you need to take that into account. For a long time, Bing just didn't taste good at all (e.g., the results were not accurate or complete enough). Now it is at a point where actually does taste good. Many people however don't get this, because they are judging whether or not it "tastes like google." But that isn't the goal. The goal is to develop a unique flavor that can be just as popular. So perhaps it would be easier for you to think of Google as Coke and Bing as Pepsi (or maybe Dr. Pepper). Now that Bing has finally gotten a good flavor, they can start working on getting more and more people to try it. Then they can be the choice of a new generation.
As it often happens on /. the summary is not correct.
In the linked article: "Bing's freshness -- search quality in terms of freshness -- is at least on par with Google" and "Shum believes that Bing has finally reached a point where it can compete with Google on a technical level".
Google still indexes a lot more websites (enter some rare keywords and Google will give you up to five times more results than Bing), and it allows quoted queries which sometimes allow you to find information much much faster.
I actually like a number of little things Bing does that make it useful to me.
For instance, when I search "movies" on both bing and google, I find bing gives me more relevant results on the first page. If I then click the Movies tab at the top it shows info laid out better (IMHO) than if you click on google's "Showtimes for..."
Bing lists movies and their showtimes by theater (with contact info and movie ratings) with a map at the side in a very clean layout.
Google lists by movies instead of theater. It adds a blurb about the movie, lists the director and top cast, and then lists the showtimes at each nearby theater. While it does give more info, I find it more difficult to find what I want. I can get the additional info google lists on bing by clicking on a particular movie. Most times I prefer to see the clean layout with the most important info listed only by theater.
This may just be a personal preference but I find that there are dozens of instances like this where bing happens to match how I'd like it and google may cram a bit more on the page but it's less relevant to me.
The one exception is that I prefer google's news layout over bing's. However, when I'm searching news I tend to go to multiple sites anyway so even though I prefer google's I still use bing's as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
Definition, shmefinition! Bing is not Google, Google doesn't do evil.... notice a pattern yet? Just negate to decode.
I couldn't find past hour/day/week search settings.
There are probably a lot more, but this was a glaring omission.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Google still offers results relevant to my original search query, Bing does as well but usual far lower down in the results.
As for "Duckduckgo" I approach privacy in an entirely different manner, in other words I don't leave ti to someone to guarantee my privacy, and consider the aforementioned search engine to be disingenuous in claiming a privacy oriented search engine.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The search itself has been for a while. In fact the result sets were often pretty similar.
Google is better though. If, for example I type in "cinema times", google will tell me what movies are on and each is a link to a list of cinemas.
The other thing I find better is many of Google's tools. Bing's maps are actually pretty good, although I think Open Streetmap has advantages over both. Bing Translate is terrible, assuming the results are the same as those facebook gives me. I have Swedish friends. I don't speak Swedish. Translating in Google produces recognisably English sentences 9 times out of 10. Bing frequently fails on a lot of words.
I've been using ddg.gg a lot lately and trying as hard as I can to like it.
I like what they say about not tracking users, and if they hold to that, they'll get major positive marks in my book. Unfortunately, since they're using Bing as a back end, I have no way of knowing if they have full control of that.
I really like their position toward not tracking users and not skewing search results based on anything previously known about the searcher. That's the way things need to be done. Again, since they're using Bing, it's hard to be certain that there's no tracking going on, though it is pretty easy to determine if results are being skewed.
Unfortunately, ddg.gg's search results don't hold a candle to google's, as anyone who compares a few searches can attest. That problem is hard.
ddg.gg also has an interface annoyance for me: The results appear with a search bar at the top of the screen that is very different from the opening search bar. It's heavily javascripted, and I am unable to click inside the box to change the search term. To search again or make a slight change to my search term, I have to back all the way out to a blank field. I'm sure I could solve it with upgrading to versions of things that I don't want or turning off java or javascript filters that I do want, but I'm not going to do that. It's a deficiency in ddg.gg.
In any event, I will continue to try to use them.
I'm surprised they didn't use a sniffer like Wireshark to see what it is sending to Microsoft. I mean this is Google they could atleast take a look.
Or is it using HTTPS for the suggested sites feature ?
New things are always on the horizon
Bing is grrreat! for 99% of my searches. The only thing lacking in Bing is that if you search for something technical - like looking for a programming answer on a message board. Google is far better at providing message board results and therefore usually better for 'technical' questions.
Part of Bing's problem is that they're trying to be "as good as Google". They need to be better than Google to catch up. Bing still has half the market share of Google. Most of Bing's traffic is from Internet Explorer, where Bing is the default browser. Few people use Bing by choice.
Google has its vulnerabilities. The quality of the business data in Google Places is pathetic. Small businesses complain constantly about Google Places, but it's not their fault. Google can't even get the big ones right. Google Places sometimes thinks Ford Motor Company headquarters is a medical clinic, that WalMart headquarters is a pharmacy, and that Fannie Mae headquarters is permanently closed. It also thinks that Coit Tower, a San Francisco landmark, is a carpet cleaning service. Try searching for Fortune 1000 companies in Google Places. The results for major companies are often just wrong. Google's approach to business locations is still very keyword-oriented, which makes it error-prone and easily spammed. It's quite common for a search for a major company to map to a hotel near their HQ.
These are "Places" queries. If you ask that question of a map system, you probably want to go there. These are queries for which there is a right answer. It's not an opinion. It's not a popularity contest. It's not "social". Google can't handle that.
Bing could win by getting that right. Real data is available about businesses and business locations.
I still have to use Google to find things on microsoft.com because Bing doesn't cut it. Sad.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Would anyone use the not quite, but almost as good (according to the developer) product?
Especially when it's Microsoft, because fuck them.
Microsoft are evil. I don't touch their OS, I don't touch their software and I am not touching their search engine. So there.
Google results via SSL proxy, with image and video search, content filtering, etc. VERY nice.
https://www.startpage.com/
From iXquick, in NL. These are the folks behind the iXquick anon proxy service.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's pathetic to suggest that after years of effort you are almost as good as the competition.
You should see the number of people who boycott Sony for its activities... they buy an Xbox instead...........
People like to take a moral stand but they also like their shiny so they make a stand and then ignore any evidence their new stance is even more insane.
Don't like MS? Go for Apple and claim it is so much more open and less evil... no matter what Apple pulls because else you have to not just give up your shiny but admit you have no morals either.
It is very human.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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
“Nearly as good,” analogous to almost a virgin and a little bit pregnant.
HRH The Duke of Windsor
I can't imagine a hijink worse than Intellectual Ventures.
Mr. Ballmer wishes to believe that this will be the year of Bing On The Desktop.
I propose that we in the linux community dispatch a team of our chair-hardened counselors in order to help him work through the stages of the inevitable grieving process in an efficient and healthy manner...
There, fixed it for you
Your "nearly as good" alternative since 1975.
Nearly as good as TinyBasic
Nearly as good as CPM
Nearly as good as 123
Nearly as good as MacOS
Nearly as good as dBase
Nearly as good as TurboPascal
Nearly as good as CompuServ
Nearly as good as Netscape Navigator
Nearly as good as Unix
Nearly as good as SGI
Nearly as good as Apache
Nearly as good as Java
Nearly as good as MacOS again
Nearly as good as iPod
Nearly as good as VMware
Nearly as good as iPhone
Nearly as good as iPad
Nearly as good as Google search...
The hits just keep coming!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Google was creeping me out... it was just too large and it bothered me that the other search giants were dying. So I made a point of using bing as much as possible.
When I started using it... it was worse then google... a lot worse. But now it's about the same.
I still sometimes check google when I'm not finding something on Bing. But increasingly I've found that if it isn't on bing it won't pop up on google either. So they seem about the same to me now.
We should be happy about this... I know lots of people just hate MS for being MS... but do we want only ONE search engine? We need to support alternate engines just to keep a dynamic marketplace.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
From the 5-6 computers there is a market for worldwide to 640k that should be enough for anyone.
To which both are misrepresented quotes with little basis in fact. But somehow have leached onto the average persons vocabulary when it comes to computers.
Way to prove your point. [/sarcasm]
http://html5zombo.com/ is as good as google html5.
-- Terry
60% of the time
No, they weren't. But I suppose that by now you've repeated that lie enough times for it to be "true".
We're almost as good as our competitor ...
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Since '97 or so, I've rarely used anything other than google; but this past year has made using them suck profoundly. First, as someone who copy/pastes URL's between browser( or elinks ) and xterm, having a SERP link get transformed into a 100+byte qstring to route through their site absolutely blows ponies. Even when I'm not logged in. Now, Bing does that as well.
Adding insult to injury, I used to get decent results using +/-, quotes, and 'Fravia's tips':)
Now they ignore it all with the notice "(without punctuation - Learn more).
SERP's blow mightly and has seriously mucked up my search-fu.
Used to be, google was Alices' Restaurant, now it feels more like a soup kitchen who monitors my intake. Worse, all the other search engines suck just as bad; either re-packaging or running on a lo-cal diet.
(sorry for the food analogy, but I hunger for 'more input':)
I've tried a dozen or so other seach sites, but in no short time, I'm back to google; holding my nose all the way.
resist propaganda
Chlamydia nearly as good as condoms
I have a script that scans my media and tries to determine what movie it is based on its name by simply searching for the name in a search engine, and taking either the first imdb reference on the results page, or the most frequently occuring one.
The idea is for users not be be forced to rename their movies but let the script harness the algorithms on the search engine to work it out.
In my testing Google beats both Bing and Yahoo easily for accuracy of searching and has less false positives. However too many automated searches will quickly lock out the IP address on Google. So now I search both Bing and Yahoo at the same time. If they disgree on the imdb reference, only then I search Google, to cast the deciding vote. This gives very accurate results, but not much more than if I could use Google alone.
Yahoo is behind Bing for accuracy in my testing. I though Yahoo signed a deal with Microsoft and were going to start using Bing 'technology' at some point. When they do my current method will become redundant.
as they are not using cookies or other tracking stuff, they just cannot track you this way.
I was a big fan of Google way back when, very early days. But as Google gets bigger and more powerful I get more concerned, and their privacy and data-snarfing issues don't make me comfortable at all. I don't want companies profiling me.
So, I'm no fan of Microsoft's business practices past or present, or much of any of their software. But I hope Bing provides some competition, just to keep Google in line.
I use DDG as my primary search engine. For a lot of things it works great, and has features that I find useful. When I'm searching for esoteric Linux config questions or equivalent, I reluctantly have to switch to Google, which provides better info. But with change DDG will get better. The fact that they want to be a search engine and not link me into their other "products" is reason enough for me to use it.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Leaves nearly as good as toilet paper. - Claims oak tree.
Silence is a state of mime.
Bing still fails the Santorum test...
Nearly as good is not nearly good enough.
To compete they must be a lot better.
And Zune was every bit as good as the iPod.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I've been using ddg.gg a lot lately and trying as hard as I can to like it.
I like what they say about not tracking users, and if they hold to that, they'll get major positive marks in my book.
That's exactly what I've done, and the position I hold. I went so far as to change ddg to be my home page in all my browsers, instead of Google. For me, a new home page is the first place I go to search, and the search bar is the second. (The awesome bar surprised me the other day with googly results because I mis-moused and hadn't changed firefox's default search provider. That's how un-awesomed I am by that turd of innovation.)
In any event, I will continue to try to use them.
Me, too. Google had many years of being the most powerful engine on the planet, and counted me amongst their legions of devoted followers, but with their pervasive google-analytics scripts on every third page on the web, doubleclick banners everywhere, and who knows what else tracking people, I'm throwing my lot in with anyone who even pretends to offer me some privacy (real or imagined.) I'm hoping that with more use, ddg will be able to grow.
Their search results aren't quite as current as Google, but they seem somewhat more relevant. It could be the Bing engines. It could be that the spammer's link farms are so finely tuned to google's Page Rank that they're not as attractive to different ranking algorithms. Or it could be that they just don't have the spidering capacity to fill their servers with the worthless crap yet.
John
You're rich, Kowalski. The infamous host file troll calling somebody else crazy. Funny stuff. I must have really gotten under your skin loony. This is so much fun, Alexander. And who do you think you're kidding pretending to be multiple people? But then for you that just comes naturally. You are a nut case. Fucking nuts. Take some meds.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
You should have been clued in it was a silly question by the fact that so few people have ever searched for "lats squats," that it wasn't in the autocomplete.If you have JS turned off, Google doesn't synonym switch on phrases that are commonly searched. Latissimus dorsi muscles are worked enough for satellite cell activation with the lat pull down machine (meh) and weighted pullups. Squats are quads, hamstrings, glutes and lower back.
Who's the fairest one of all?
Evil queen throws fit, beheads dwarfs. News at eleven.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Bing executive: 'We have caught up' to Google in search quality" - Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2010.
That's just sad
Pity we can't force idiots like to this use Bing as their punishment.. would cut down this type of problem in no time
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
I know exactly what you mean bro. It's yet another example of the same thing I've been seeing with Google lately--just changing shit for the hell of it cause they think it should be a certain way, with no regard to those who are negatively affected by the change. It's the exact same attitude we see with groups like Gnome, Ubuntu, etc, and will be the doom of Google for the same reason.
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
There doesn't need to be an anti-Google campaign. Google's actions are enough to screw them on their own.
My definition is that when I enter some search results, the first three hits listed make sense. As someone who regulartly touches PCs of other people -people clueless of what the quick search bar in the top of their browser is using as engine- I can say that for me the main way to distinguish between Bing and Google is by looking at the search results: With Google I typiclaly find what I look for dead on, while Bing manages to confuse me and make me look again whether I typed the correct keywords. I must admit, they are slightly improving, but reputation comes by foot and leaves by horse, as we say in the Nethelands...
There is no way I would ever use a search facility named after an irritating 1940s smoothy singer with Brycreemed hair and ears that stuck out too far.
Just the word "Bing" makes me think of that dreary "White Xmas" song that, every year from late October onwards, every shoping mall and large store puts on their PA system in endless loop mode.
Define "nearly" please.
I wrote a short story called "It's hard living in Jerusalem during the winter".
Search engines, can you please help people find it?
Google: First result.
Bing: Not found - at least not in the first 250 results. Searching with quotes does help though.
DuckDuckGo: Miserable failure - even quotes don't help - and it IS supposed to use other search engines.
So either Bing and DDG suck, or they just hate me personally. Either way, I'm not going to use any of them.
hemi
I think Bing is nearly as good as Google now.
Has Microsoft stopped stealing results? Gonna get flamed, but they also claim their spam filter for hotmail/live is good too. Azure never crashes, .NET keeps the stock market up and their Enterprise products are 99.9% up. Well at least they manage to keep Bing up, but how does that scale without PageRank (PigeonRank?). They just don't seem to do well using groups of computers to run their services.
Society use your Sciences
I've always used Google as search engine and at least in Spain is the form used by over 90% of active members. Bing hopefully improve and have the option to use this search effectively.
One plus side: at least there's plenty of food for it :)
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
I've had enough with Microsoft's anti-competitive cheating (essentially), astro-turfing, stomping on competitors.... Google may have their problems, but they have it within their culture to at least try to do the right thing by their user base.
Microsoft is very tough on their competitors. Google's aggressiveness is aimed at their users. This reflects their business models. Microsoft's customers are the people who buy Microsoft software and hardware. Ad-supported services are a sideline for Microsoft. Google's customers are their advertisers. Google users are a product.
I tried it for a little while, a few months back. I loved their shiny yet clean interface, I loved their philosophies... but after using it for a little while, I realized that at least 75% of all the things I searched for, I gave up and prepended !google to the front of it to get any useful results. So I gave up and just went back to google.
Have they really gotten that much better in the past few months? I doubt it...