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.
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
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.
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.