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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."
...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!
"Nearly as good" like "not good as"?
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.
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.
If it uses Microsoft servers and software on the back end, I want to say: DuckAndCover.
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.
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...
That looks a lot like nginx running on Ubuntu.
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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.
I don't consider the changes they made very significant, but I had actually always assumed that they aggregated results between their different products. I actually prefer to have a single privacy policy, but I do realize that the potential for abuse is greater with the aggregation. From what I've seen so far though, their is no abuse ... they only do what they said they'd do with the data. Microsoft on the other hand is using extortion tactics to force companies to give them money for producing Linux devices, and makes it extremely difficult for me to buy a laptop without paying for Windows. I'm also very bitter with them over the OOXML travesty among other things. If you don't want Google to track your searches, don't log in for searches. I would like the option to choose whether or not I have search results targeted to my taste though ... I would imagine running a search while not being logged in will also do that though.
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
Thank you very, very much. I didn't know about that feature and the constant miscorrection was driving me insane. No, Google, I don't want pictures of a "boy tucked in bed", thank you.
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.
Some people have no idea how to use a search engine.
And some people search for more complex issues that 'pony midget sex video". (211,000 hits in Google).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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..."
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.
Dilbert RSS feed
It helps if you add the name of the pony you'd like to fuck
pony midget sex video rainbow dash -> 11,200 results
More to the point, use the damn video search if you want videos.
pony midget sex rainbow dash -> 5,770 result
I swear. It's like people have no fucking clue how to find porn anymore.
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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Could be worse, it could run on BSoD.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
BING stands for But It's Not Google!
Don't get all happy because Microsoft has temporarily decided not to abuse us. It's only temporary.