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Comment by sremani | Hacker News Reader

I disagree, I use Bing on regular basis (also their rewards which I use to donate to local school helps). The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards. Its the habit of Googling rather than Objective result set, that is impediment to Bing adoption. Now that Cortana is on Windows 10, lets see.

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> The results are comparable with Google, and are not that far off by any standards.

What is the value proposition that differentiates them from Google?

Its a strange question, as a consumer, I enjoy choice of Search Engines and hopefully there will be more than two. I may be minority, but my Bing search results feel much much closer to what I am looking for than Google. It could be my own bias or the simple fact that there is too much SEO gaming targeted to Google compared to Bing.

Fair enough but honestly, I pretty much find this true:

* Google

* DuckDuckGo [ Although with the Ad changes, if I don't have an Ad Blocker enabled, this tends to beat Google. As such, it tends to my default since I use JS blocking. ]

* Yandex / Bing

I think DuckDuckGo gets it's results largely from Bing.

I predominantly see the Yandex symbol and Yandex is cheaper than Bing so I'm not sure that is true.

There are actually a number of factors that go into which you might trigger the most, our primary source is Yahoo! but we also pull from Bing and Yandex in certain regions, as well as information from 400 other sources including Wikipedia, and our own crawler. You can read more about the sources here: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

We try and provide the best results for a query in a region/language regardless of the price. The only caveat is that we will only pull from sources that allow us to continue our privacy commitment to users.

The rewards are one. Granted, they're not huge (I also use Bing and find it amounts to about 1 $5 Amazon gift card per month), but if you find the result quality indistinguishable, it's enough. Also, like sremani, I want to drive innovation in the area of search, and while lots of people pay lip service to wanting more competition, putting your money where your mouth is by not using Google is the only real way to do that.

True, I really do like the rewards. But I really think Bing would get rid of them if it would was a good financial decision. And I think it would be a decent decision if Bing was doing better.

I'm sure that Microsoft has a great deal of data telling them that the Rewards program has a positive ROI, especially because a lot of the rewards are sweepstakes which essentially cost them nothing. Also, I have watched other people use Bing and seen four-digit numbers in their rewards count on the top-right. (It's agonizing, like watching someone who doesn't know about tab-completion use the command line.) This tells me that the number of people who use the Rewards is quite small and this contributes to its usefulness.

Fair enough, I can see people being motivated by $60/year if they find the results comparable.

I've had the exact opposite experience. Admittedly it's not a completely fair fight (Google has years of data to tailor results to me, and I know on some level what sort of queries work from experience), but it's common that if I use Bing (it is the default on my Windows Phone) the thing I'm looking for won't be on the first page of results. Using the exact same query on Google almost always has it in the top 3 results.

It's not useless by any stretch, but when (very roughly speaking) a quarter of my searches end up with me going to Google anyway, there isn't much value in trying Bing first.

I have the opposite experience. When searching in Bing I almost always feel "no way that what I'm looking is there somewhere", even for something as simple as a programming language query.

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