Why Google is better than Bing and it’s likely to continue that way | Hacker News Reader

Why Google is better than Bing and it’s likely to continue that way

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11 pointsnikhilbd18 comments

I was hoping for some kind of deeper dive, that list is very 10,000 feet. I've found Google's results to be increasingly frustrating, but Bing is no better. I do like how Bing extracts date, post count, and last post date information from forums. I really don't enjoy a page of results that don't match my query which I tend to get more of on Google than Bing. Google is still king for code searches. Yahoo is so very far behind both of them.

I firmly believe the next "search engine" will be a curated directory of content and not automated. Then I can just leave out the spam sites and junk.

Agreed, I didn't feel there was a lot of meat here. We know Google collects more data, and they have more staff working on search than Microsoft does. Their algorithms are better, sure.

That being said, I tend to use Bing, and just go to Google when Bing fails me. It's not that often. The only major weakness Bing seems to have is searching Google websites, and I doubt that's completely unintentional.

> I firmly believe the next "search engine" will be a curated directory of content and not automated. Then I can just leave out the spam sites and junk.

A curated directory cannot work at scale if one has to curate it for billion of users manually. Most people aren't interested in curated search, Google kinda tried that already. What people want is the most accurate result given a query, which can only be done by an trained AI.

Google already curates your search results to you. Search something, then search again from another machine and IP.

I firmly believe the next "search engine" will be a curated directory of content and not automated. Then I can just leave out the spam sites and junk.

That's sort of what Yahoo started out as, back in the late-90's. I wish this was still possible, but how could anyone make it scale in 2015?

> That's sort of what Yahoo started out as, back in the late-90's. I wish this was still possible, but how could anyone make it scale in 2015?

It didn't even scale in the 1990s, which is why Google won.

They didn't scale it right, I think a directory search combo would be the right direction. The directory sites are crawled and indexed, then you search like we normally search now.

>Yahoo is so very far behind both of them.

Yahoo is just a front end for Bing, so can't really be behind it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm

> Yahoo is just a front end for Bing, so can't really be behind it.

Back when Apple Maps on iOS was just a front-end for Google Maps, many people found it to be considerably behind Google Maps as used through other mechanisms. Being a front-end for X doesn't mean you can't be behind X, or even ahead in UX.

They were talking about results - so I'd argue UX/UI was an irrelevant issue. They want relevant results, which Google is increasingly getting worse at (with Bing no better) and "Yahoo far behind".

Yahoo would be equivalent to Bing in regards to search results.

Context is important.

> They were talking about results - so I'd argue UX/UI was an irrelevant issue.

What I said was an alternate front-end to a service can be behind in any way, and even (as a side note) ahead in UX/UI (its less likely to be ahead in other ways, unless a service has useful features in its back end that aren't accessible through the primary front-end.)

I remember that now, I still didn't believe it. I just did a side by side incognito search and they had almost identical results. They had very different metadata though interspersed. ie: Yahoo Answers, Bing Related Searches

What do you think of DuckDuckGo?

I have tried it off and on, I think I need to learn how to write queries that bring me the results I want from it.

In the Plex had an interesting section where they highlighted that Baidu vs Google in China. The interesting piece was Google was better in every way for search engine relevance except for recent events or trending topics in terms of relevance for that day. Google eventually fixed that.

My point is, to beat Google it may be better to own niche search topics or elements of search. I remember when Bing tried the aesthetics way for a while there. I'd argue in terms of value, Amazon may be the closest competitor in search to Google. Mainly because Amazon's search data is extremely valuable as these are people set on buying things.

Microsoft have a genuine opportunity through SharePoint and Windows. The sun will set on it soon though if they aren't able to capitalise.

Because Google has a new logo?

Frankly the article doesn't have a better reason ...

No offense to the writer as he seems to be quite an accomplished guy but this seems to be a list that for lack of better wording a 5 year old can come up with.

Google had a head start: that's true but eventually there will be diminishing returns on it as the company matures. Also since the field of search engines have advanced by quite a bit since Google first came to be and allot because of it other companies can reap the rewards of that work.

Google has a bigger set of data: Again something that kinda combines point 1 with the fact that they have a larger market share while this is probably one of the most relevant points of the article this advantage again eventually will hit diminishing returns. The amount of data point's isn't the only thing that is important, at some point there won't be much difference in the data you can mine from fact that 10000000 users between the age of 12 and 16 searched for Justin Biber vs just that 1000000 users searched the same. Having larger dataset also presents a challenge on it's own since it might be more costly and difficult to analyze while not getting much additional insight than you would from a smaller dataset as many of your datapoints might be identical or reaching entropy.

Google can attract better talent: Again something i highly doubt so considering the amount of world class scientists and engineers working for Microsoft. Microsoft also is the 4th largest spender in R&D in the world it spends as much as Intel so not only can they attract talent but they seem to be also spending much more on research.

Google invested more resource: Maybe maybe not, but MSFT spends more on Research than Google does this can eventually cause Bing to be competitive on a technical level (and i don't have any way to effectively measure it) than Google. Google also spends allot of resources on other things than it's search engine, it would be actually quite interesting to see how much of it's R&D spending relates to it's search engine/s vs other products.

Company focus: Considering where Google has been going for the past few years i really don't think that's true anymore, sure the search engine is and always be an integral part of the company but I don't know if you can say that it's their main focus.

What makes this list nothing but fud is the fact that those points are so generic that you can replace Google and Bing with any 2 companies competing for the same market and they'll fit exactly the same and sound just as logical and thought through. For example replace Google with Nokia and Bing with Apple and search engine with Phone and you could've published that same article when apple released their 1st iphone and i would read just the same and would seem perfectly viable but we all know how that turned out.

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