Microsoft's Bing Isn't a Joke Anymore
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Example that blew away a colleague at work using a Surface Pro: "Cortana - I'm trying to find an Excel function to do X & Y. What should I use?" Not only did Bing find a serviceable answer, but because we made the search while Excel was opened, the function was auto-populated in the highlighted cell.
2) Some of the Bing/Cortana cognitive intelligence APIs are pretty cool and pretty available to anyone. As an example, I was hacking at a chat bot for Skype + Slack for fun one weekend, and I noticed that there was a tool that could take an image, and provide a description of what was in the image. If it was of a baseball player, the level of detail would be down to the color of her/his shirt.
Why do I need to give it access to my search history and email to be able to find excel functions for me?
You should think of your personal data as a valuable asset that you can use to pay for things. Now you know why you need to give Cortana access to them.
Do you think this is the sole reason behind that?
Well it won't allow me to turn it on because I live in France and thus have a "french" MS/Live account but set my system language to English. Go figure†.
† I can very well make up a zillion obscure and convoluted technical and/or legal reasons, but none make any sense from a end-user point of view, which is, in the end, what matters.
Not to the courts.
Second, that doesn't actually matter in this case anyway (and is a red herring) because it is Cortana automating Office and not the other way around. Win32 automation is relatively straight forward, including the most basic automation of them all: cut, copy, and paste. It could be Cortana is calling into COM components in Office or even older, more generic Windows Automation COM components. (Which can still be done, with permissions, from "inside the sandbox". Again the "sandbox" is not as locked down as a lot of people seem to think it is, especially in Windows 10.)
I'd be curious to see XAML adoption with respect to usage.
Just for the heck of it I just grepped the log on my one server. It's got about 200 different domains, mostly smaller sites. About 600k hits today. ~5,000 referrals from Google, ~200 from Bing. Strangely enough there seems to be about 11,000 hits from Bingbot and only about half that from Googlebot crawlers.
I'd be interested in hearing how those numbers compare to other sites.
Google has indexed more than 50 times as many pages as Bing on that site, and crawls far more aggressively (over a million pages per day), which will both be factors, but the main one is probably still that Bing has less visitors.
So for me Bing is still irrelevant as a source of traffic. Even though I'd prefer to see some competition for Google, there just isn't any. DuckDuckGo referred me just 32 visitors yesterday, so they have even further to go!
Although my site is in English, over 50% of visitors are from outside the US. Bing doesn't really have the global reach of Google.
For example I get 250 times as much traffic from India with Google rather than Bing, 1000 times as much in Indonesia. Compared to 36 times as much in the US (which is much closer to the ratio of the other sites, which may be more US-focused).
It's probably a bit harsh to call Bing a "local US search engine" (like Baidu and Yandex in their countries), but it certainly needs to get more market share in other countries to compete globally.
I believe this is why many developers will find Google is a lot better. A lot of our searches are very specific error messages, for example.
In other words, the most likely case where "double indirection" occurs is in very long tail searches that Yahoo has not seen recently.
DuckDuckGo uses Yahoo BOSS search API (closed down for everyone but DDG nowadays) which relies on the Bing search engine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_BOSS
If Yahoo hosts the BOSS API on their servers or in on Microsoft servers as part of their deal, isn't known. As DDG recently started to provide the search results from a Yahoo sub-domain (and from Yahoo (or Microsoft?) data centers) to minimize the huge latency (that everyone hates) a little bit.
"To get access to the most relevant Yahoo technology, due to contractual obligations that call has to be associated with a Yahoo domain, in this case, duckduckgo-owned-server.yahoo.net." Of course they mention only the first part, as Yahoo itself relies on the Microsoft contract to access Bing search directly.
See: https://duck.co/help/results/yahoo-technical-implementation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
If you want it as a default, add it to your browser as a search engine plugin: http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...
Or: Search tools → All results → Verbatim
To the poster below, putting the query in double quotes definitely does not do exact string matching.
Many years ago, IIRC, Google Search also supported boolean AND/OR, but that was also removed, for no obvious reason.
Edit: verbatim not verbose
It feels like a vote of no confidence. I would be absolutely shocked if Google's algorithm doesn't have a special alarm bell for "2 dozen search query redefinitions and then they typed fucking 'Bing' into me."
That's funny. I'm going to start doing that.
I get frustrated w/ Google when I do a search and the top results do not have a single instance of one of my search terms on their pages. I have no idea why they'd do that. So I switch to Bing in those cases.
I've noticed my site ranks significantly worse in Bing/DDG than on Google. All I've done for Google is on page SEO, nothing fancy or Google specific.
I'm wondering if I've set something up incorrectly that I could fix via Bing Webmaster tools or some other method.
Update:
Apparently, this is not so. I now rank the same in DDG/Bing as in Google when I search from my devices.
I can't account for this. Just a week ago (before writing this post) I was ranking much worse, when searching from my devices. But I checked my logs, and I've had no surge in Bing related traffic. So the issue was specific to me?
Would still be very interested in a Bing technical SEO guide, as it would help me troubleshoot cases like that.
Also, I can add that my Bing + Yahoo + DDG traffic is about 3% of the total volume of Google searches. My demographic is young, college educated people who are applying to law school.
If not, it's hard to say why. There are a few factors.
-Bing might have taken longer to crawl new content.
-Bing seems to value exact keyword matches more than Google does.
-Google likes to show multiple types of content if a query's intent is ambiguous. Bing tends not to do this.
I might not have been searching for a broad enough range of stuff before, or maybe I only searched the newest pages.
1. Make sure your keyword has a lot of search volume, at least on Google
2. Add that exact keyword string into a headline on the page, since Bing might not be smart enough to know what its searchers are intending.
3. If that doesn't work, just wait for Bing to "catch up" to Google for this type of search.
Shameful admission: Bing is my primary search engine, since they pay me (approx $50 over the past 18 months). 90+% of the time the search results are as good as Google, and re-searching when it isnt takes a few seconds.
I started using Bing for the rewards program. I would probably use it even without the rewards program, now. The results are approximately as good as Google - when I can't find something and I go to Google, 95% of the time Google isn't giving me good results either. There are some nice little features and I like the look and layout, but fundamentally what really sold it was the rewards program, which I've been turning into Amazon gift cards and using to fill my bookshelves.
But every time someone sees me use Bing, or I mention that I use Bing, there's very often some judgement there. Like it or not, people, even people on HN, judge you by the tools you use. The social aspect matters: Google and Apple produce excellent technical products, but they're so popular in part because of social effects. No surprise; humans are fundamentally social animals, none of us are beyond fashion.
IMO, $50/18mo. isn't worth taking a quality hit on anywhere near 10% (or even 1%) of my searches.
Maybe Microsoft has the big multi-product company thing figured out.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-22/google-and...
So I use Linux Mint to avoid that bother, after an Adobe PDF Reader installed a free version of McAfee and i think changed my search engine in Windows 10 because I forgot to do a custom install and tell it not to or whatever.
Firefox changed from Google to Yahoo, and Chrome uses Google and I use more than one web browser to test out webpages and site designs and other stuff. I preview any web app I am designing in different web browsers to see if I need to change HTML or CSS or whatever to make it look better, even how it looks on Mobile devices.
I sort of want my web search to come from Google, I put Adsense on my website and Youtube page. I want to see how SEO works in Google for my Adsense pages.
I admit that Bing has improved over the years, but it is not enough to convince me to switch from Google to Bing just yet. I get more referrals from Google for some reason than I do from Yahoo or Bing.
So really it's just conditioning whether people prefer Pepsi or Coke.
I'm also a bit surprise that Bing video search is no longer available, at least not in Denmark.
Bing video search is available for me in New Zealand, interesting that it doesn't work for you in Denmark.
http://www.recode.net/2015/6/29/11563964/microsoft-to-stop-c...
Doesn't sound like it will affect the user experience much.
Well, profitable could mean by a dollar, and I don't see any shouting from the rooftops by Microsoft. I also don't see, as someone else brings up, much in the way of their presence in my server logs either.
What really gets me are all the articles that appear on MSN but really turn out to be searches with Bing. Don't know if they still do that. I don't use MSN either.
I still use google for the most part, but I haven't found myself in a situation where I open the Bing drawer and say "Oh god, this is so bad, if only it searched Google instead". So I guess it's not that bad. Maybe I should try switching to Bing full time to see how it goes.
As others mention the name is just godawful. Chanandlerbong.com would be an improvement.
1) it's Microsoft
2) it's not better than Google
I'd gladly use it more if they would fix #2. Google has gotten horribly bad about not searching for what I ask it for. It's been castrated. It insists on returning what it thinks I want, not what I asked for. I know that for 99% of the people that's the right thing to do, but I really hate that Google has given the shaft to power users.
One test actually used a randomized ranking function on wikipedia search (so the algorithm recalled as well as google, but randomly ranked the results without any thought to relevance) vs Google, and we labeled the random data as Google and the Google result as Yahoo!. Testing told us the garbage data with the G over it was better.
I dunno what you wanna do with that data. Maybe some soul searching? Funny story, though.
A lot of what the powersetters did was bring their expertise in indexing in. The Powerset indexing requirements were fairly intense, so bing getting those was a big leg up over the previous (good, but somewhat less informed) work.
A lot of the stuff we had at Powerset as custom services is now in Google and MS cognitive services. It's so cool to have access to those tools again. Luis.ai is really really fun to use lately.
Google tends to be better for things I'm looking for very specifically, unless those things are likely to match DMCA takedown search terms (where there are DMCA notices at the bottom of results pages).
Bing tends to be better for things that are vaguely like what I'm searching for, and for specifics if they're likely to match DMCA takedown search terms.
Another is the date control, google thinks older is better but it very often isn't.
The date options suck too. Last week is usually zero hits, last month maybe one unrelated one, but then last year returns far too many. What I really want is to add a weighting so that newer stuff has higher priority.
I've posted about this before, here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11386924
Here's a snippet from that post:
Nowadays, when I search for something like this:
"search phrase one" "search phrase two"
This prevents basically all of Google's word heuristics, like searching for related words or dropping parts of the search.
Show me how to do that search qualification ahead of time, e.g. from the Firefox search box, and not as a post processing step after a search is completed. Or how to do that without JavaScript enabled. That kind of thing was easily possible before.
A long time ago I bought a book called Google Hacks[1]. It had all sorts of good tips on how to search better. E.g there were Perl and Python scripts to interface with Google. Now, running scripts like that will probably get your IP address banned (I don't know for sure, I haven't tried lately).
My point remains, Google used to be easy to use for advanced searches, without JavaScript. Not any more. There's a lot missing now.
Add this as a search provider:
http://mycroftproject.com/search-engines.html?name=google+ve...
The '&tbs=li' paramater is the magic flag, for 'literal'
I just tried Google with JS disabled. It's right at the side:
I wasn't seeing that text because: Firefox prevented this page from automatically redirecting to another page. If I "allow" that redirection, then it shows what's in your image. And it properly refines the results without needing help from JavaScript.
Firefox is probably doing that because under Preferences -> Advanced I have checked the box: Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page. I just tried a virgin Firefox installation and that box is not checked by default. I don't know if it was the default in older versions, or if I flipped it myself.
tbf, I don't feel the same way as the GP. But this search always struck me as crazy in the past.
Yes, "google" is a suggested search when you type "hoogle", but that seems only fair. After all, G and H are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure a typo for google swamps deliberate searches for hoogle (maybe even for me, but then I have a custom search keyword). They're also suggesting other Google services you might want (Translate, Maps and Drive, when I tried), not just the one you're already using.
More generally, I don't see how overly generic suggestions amount to dumbing-down Google Search. If I actually persist and search for "hoogle" (which I had to do anyway in the days before search suggestions) I get the Haskell results I want, even without any connection to my Google account.
I wonder if the increased search volume over the past hour since you posted this updated the probability that it was a mistyping?
It wouldn't surprise me - unique vocabulary (think hashtags) created all the time, and Google is pretty good at responding to that.
However, it seems you can't shut off location-based personalization, at least while logged out. For example, search "pizza" without quotes in a private window. In addition to showing you a map with nearby locations based on geolocation, the actual results will also include pizza places near your geolocation. I can imagine that there are probably scenarios where that kind of personalization might negatively affect someone searching for general information, although I can't think of any particular use cases off the top of my head.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Personalized_Search