“Bing is bigger than you think,” Microsoft boasts, at 33% of US searches | Hacker News Reader

“Bing is bigger than you think,” Microsoft boasts, at 33% of US searches

onmsft.com

76 pointsartsandsci136 comments

And how many of those searches are initiated by MS spyware that watches what you type in the start menu?

(If you have a Windows computer with default privacy settings, press the Start key; type a few letters. You just "searched" Bing)

a.) yes

b.) I don't like or use that feature

c.) But aren't that searches?

To your C), see my other comment on this same thread. Yes, and it's valid in a "which search engine handles the biggest amount of search".

But what matters money wise for their share holders, for you as a potential customer (ad buyer), ... is not how many search they take on, it's how many times your ads can be seen. And in that context, those aren't worth anything.

(of course that is until they try to embed ads there, but since even Google hasn't found a way yet I don't see Microsoft taking the first step)

Yes, but every search taken on Bing is less money for Google.

I think the point is that this type of search isn't worth anything to anyone because it can't result in an ad being displayed. It benefits MS because they can talk about big "search" numbers, but no one else cares.

If as a Win10 user I'm getting used to searching in the "Start" menu I'm not going to google.com

The point is that if you're searching for "n", "no", "not", "note", "notep", "notepa" and "notepad" because you typed a bit slowly into your start menu, those 7 searches count for nothing by any useful metric, be it either anything a human was interested in, or anything an advertiser is interested it. Google doesn't lose out a search because typing "notepad" into the Start menu never meant a desire to search the internet in the first place. If Bing is counting those as searches they aren't very "real". I say "if" because I don't have any direct knowledge.

The point is that if you're searching for "n", "no", "not", "note", "notep", "notepa" and "notepad" [...] "notepad help" because you typed a bit slowly into your google search field, those 11 searches count for nothing by any useful metric, be it either anything a human was interested in, or anything an advertiser is interested it.

Thank you for repeating my point back at me...? I find myself seriously wondering if you're a bot?

You haven't read my comment.

Google doesn't search on every letter you type.

Aren't Firefox/Ubuntu/Chrome doing the same for Google (eg type a few letters and they search for suggestions in their local db [bookmarks, history, ...] but also make a remote search for more) ?

Not saying this as anti-Google, pro-Microsoft or pro/anti anyone, merely agreeing with you that the "% of {area|time|...} search" means absolutely nothing.

Especially in the context that matters for potential Bing customers, aka ads buyers: I don't care about how many search there are, I care about how many people can see my ad.

Of course no big search entity has any interest of giving those "real search" numbers, neither the front runner nor the underdog.

Actually, for a while, Ubuntu tried to do this with Amazon. I'm not sure if it is still there, I doubt it, but I remember the unity-advertising-lens-removal fix being pretty popular at the time.

Ubuntu got a lot of shit for doing that with Amazon so I think they stopped doing it, and Firefox has as far as I know never done a remote search until you press enter, the suggestions in the bar are all based on local data.

Firefox absolutely does run searches after you agree into it after installation.

At least it's opt-in though, unlike windows.

AFAIK it doesn't on address bar but of course it does on search bar for suggestions. That's why they were keeping the two separate.

There is a setting to enable suggestions also in the location bar (off by default, I think).

But you do have to agree first. I find predictive search distracting, so I've never turned it on.

The double standards are strong here.

How so? It's Microsoft that's making pretty bold claims based on these numbers, not Google.

TBH if Google was in 2nd position they would have done the same.

I'd argue people know (even expect) they are searching Google when they type in a browser address bar. No one wants Bing search results when they type in the start menu.

> No one wants Bing search results when they type in the start menu

I don't understand why people speak for the whole population. I'm sure MS runs Analytics for these and would've killed it off if "no one" wants it.

This does not sound like a thing Microsoft would do at all. It is one of those small annoyances people just will get used to

> I'm sure MS runs Analytics for these and would've killed it off if "no one" wants it.

Microsoft users do not want it.

Microsoft customers want it.

In case it's not obvious, when Windows was given away for free, the users were no longer customers, and transitioned to become "product".

> I'd argue people know (even expect) they are searching Google when they type in a browser address bar. No one wants Bing search results when they type in the start menu.

NO!! I don't expect to be searching Google when I type something into the browser address bar. That is what the search bar is for.

Whats your reasoning for holding out on this?

Keyboard shortcut? Privacy concerns?

Honestly curious because I feel the search bar has long since been made redundant. The only people I see using it in the wild is my parents/their friends.

Firefox isn't. It has a separated search bar and won't send any data over the wires when using the address bar. Ubuntu also changed back from their "we are entitled into spying on anything" opinion, and aren't starting remote searches automatically either.

Anyway, wether those automatic searches will display the ads or not is a different issue. Many will.

> Firefox [...] has a separated search bar and won't send any data over the wires when using the address bar

It can does offer suggestions from the address bar, but only after you click "yes I want this". Same for the search bar.

What you say sounds like the search bar does send keypresses and like the address bar can't (both are incorrect).

For the address bar, is it some setting hidden in about.config? I have never found it.

Normal address bar suggestions come from local data stores, not from a search provider. (And I tough both suggestions were enabled by default, but well, it's been many years since I last configured a fresh Firefox install.)

They've started asking for the opt-in to include search suggestions for a few months now if I remember correctly. Right in the address bar itself, no funny config setting.

Firefox asks you first "do you want search suggestions", both for the search bar and for the address bar.

I expect those things from a web browser, I don't expect it from an application launcher.

Basically one in the same these days no?

iirc mac os also does this with the cmd+space launcher. I think maybe even gnomes launcher does this as well.

Yeah, it isn't a coincidence that windows 10 was the first "free" major OS upgrade from MS and then we see numbers like this.

Weren't Windows 7 and 8 already having "web search" enabled for the start menu ? I'm sure it was there, but not if that was default behavior or if it needed to be enabled.

Not a Windows 10 introduction, although that one tends to find any excuse it can to call home.

Maybe Windows 8? Because definitely not 7. I think it offered you to "search the internet" (aka bing), but it didn't do that by itself, you had to click that option.

Microsoft doesn't yield enough sales or profit from Bing for such a thing to matter at all, versus the profit given up from the free upgrade on their single most profitable product. Bing is a financial joke compared to Windows and always will be.

The free upgrade was to get people off of 7 and 8. Windows 7 was an aging product that people were reluctant to give up, and Windows 8 was a disaster that was accelerating the erosion of Windows and doing damage to a brand worth tens of billions of dollars. Windows 8 was acting as a product generation blockade, most 7 users didn't want to touch it, and people who bought it had a poor experience. Bing had nothing to do with the free upgrade at all.

The upgrade changed your search provider to Bing unless you were very careful, I believe in more than one place. It also tries hard to default you to Edge which would take you to Bing. And I believe it added lots of new agreements on tracking. There is now a Cortana/Bing voice search service that can't really be fully turned off that came with it or one of thelater upgrades I think.

Ditto for asking Siri anything that she cannot handle via specialized search conduits (weather, sports scores, etc.). Anything else ends up as a web search powered by Bing, and its tallied even if it was useless and unused.

This often happens to me when I'm exploring the edges of what Siri can do (which is much less than Alexa or Google's assistant). It also happens when Siri mis-hears me and can't properly route the search query to weather, sports, or whatever handler would have been appropriate.

And note that while it is possible to change Safari's default search engine, it is not possible to make these Siri searches run on anything other than Bing. I'm sure Apple is being paid handsomely (and keeping some valuable data out of Google's hands).

My mom has a Windows laptop which she uses without even really understanding what a web browser is, or what a search engine is. She uses Bing because that's what the Windows search bar defaults to and because the default web browser on Windows by default opens with MSN as its home page, and she doesn't understand she has a choice in any of this, and probably wouldn't bother to change anything even if she did understand and knew how to change it.

I strongly suspect that many Bing users are similarly borderline computer-illiterate, and just use Bing because it's the default.

The same probably goes for many Google users, a lot of whom were probably tricked by some software they installed that had a tiny checkmark and small print telling them it was going to install Chrome and make Google their home page.

I think the demographics that just use the default search engine are probably most desirable for the advertising publisher as they are more likely to click on ads.

Advertisers aren't looking for the most likely to click, they are looking for the most likely to convert. Clicks cost money so they only want to pay for people that are highly targeted. This is why search advertising is so powerful, it is about matching the intent of the user (their search terms) to products and services, and getting them at the right time (when they are open to new paths).

Search ads are powerful for targeting users, but branding requires FB kind of ads.

Yeah, a huge portion of the traffic to a search engine is always going to come from default users. I don't think that changes this much, or makes it misleading or anything.

My mom would bing www.google.com and then go from there. So maybe give yours some credit. Yes, it's totally different from what we (we as in "technologically raised people") would do, but it still is a valid workaround.

Show her whats better about Duck Duck Go, Google or whatever other alternative you see fit, have her see the value, and she'll probably switch in a way that's convenient to her.

Search is such an integral part of how we use the internet today and a vast improvement of the link sites and books from 20 years ago.

Competition in this space has never been more important, in particular in light of recent news of censorship from google and various big companies.

Although I personally use DDG I applaud anyone that tries to compete with google and I hope that Microsoft won't give up on Bing.

Edit: typos

Some things to note:

* The Amazon Echo uses Bing as it's default search engine, which almost certainly explains why the US has so much larger usage than other countries (since Amazon is so big in the US).

* Windows' search bar feature searches the internet by default with Bing. As an aside, it's interesting to me how bad the backlash was on Canonical for doing this a few years ago, but it appears most Windows users don't care.

* Edge uses Bing by default, and a not-insignificant number of internet users likely don't know (or care) to change their default search engine. Hell, some people probably just Bing "google" and then use Google. I've seen my grandparents do that before.

So really these statistics seem to be quite misleading.

> but it appears most Windows users don't care.

That's very likely. Probably, most people that care are using Linux or something more niche. That's why Linux distros can not do the same.

That is similar to the walled garden situation, where Apple can wall their users, but Microsoft can't.

> So really these statistics seem to be quite misleading.

I would argue it's less that they are misleading and more that people are still learning that there is more than one way to initiate a search.

Do most people know that typing in the Windows Start Bar initiates a web search?

> Do most people know that typing in the Windows Start Bar initiates a web search?

I hope so, or otherwise we would have to decide that making local search functionality ping the internet is unethical[1]. I'm only half joking of course, but it's more than a little worrying that there isn't more outrage about this.

[1]: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/01/ubuntu-online-search-feat...

Unpopular to admit here (unlike, say, reddit): Bing is useful for pornography, Google is not.

Hi, my name is thanatropism and on occasion I look at pornography. Throw eggs at will.

We all are guilty of that crime ;)

Do you have a preference on egg type, I have quite a few ostrich eggs but no chicken eggs.

Purely for academic reasons of course, why is Bing better suited for this purpose?

bing still lets you control safe search filters the way google used to

You get audio and video previews on the thumbnails. It's a great user experience, but in terms of quantity, way less search results than the better porn aggregator out there.

google changed their search results so that it is impossible to entirely disable safe search.

It's because Google is better at hiding such results and it's impossible to completely turn off safe search. So Bing by being the major player left is better for such searches.

Who is Will and why should we throw eggs at him?

IIRC, some Microsoft employee mentioned that this was not an accident - that they had people expressly working on making the porn searches (and search experience) good.

Some job, eh?

My experience is that Bing is also better at non-porn, but NSFW material. I've had to search for medical images from time to time, and Google's safe-browsing filter is way overzealous. Color me surprised!

I actually use bing maps because it provides access to UK Ordnance Survey small scale (1:50,000 and 1:25,000) map data.

Provide it and they will come.

Any time I see that some of my results have been culled on Google due to DMCA, I usually pop over to Bing and find what I am looking for.

No duckduckgo is bigger than you think.

They'll be at a billion queries per month early next year most likely.

1/12 the size of bing may not sound like much, but I believe it's still run by just a few fulltime employees (fair amount of part-timers). Plus DDG isn't burning a billion dollars a year to compete with Google.

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

How do they plan to make money?

I understand they are already profitable:

http://fortune.com/2015/10/09/duckduckgo-profitable/

Thanks for this link, it's a short article but I hadn't heard about it. I switched my default search engine to DDG about a year ago (occasionally using !g syntax for Google search), and really appreciate their service. I'm glad to hear they've found a profitable model that doesn't need to track users.

If you want better privacy try !s instead

The important bit of the article is the quote at the end, which I will quote in full:

> Most of the money is still made without tracking people by showing you ads based on your keyword, i.e. type in car and get a car ad. These ads are lucrative because people have buying intent. All that tracking is for the rest of the Internet without this search intent, and that's why you're tracked across the Internet with those same ads.

They don't link to their source, but a simple search solved that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10346440

And for good measure, I also ran the search through Google. On Google it's the top hit; on DDG I have to pagedown once. (A random selection of words, without punctuation or apostrophes, quoted to do a literal search.)

For one, they add their affiliate links to some store URLs:

"Similarly, we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites (e.g. Amazon & eBay) that results in small commissions being paid back to DuckDuckGo when you make purchases at those sites."

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

DDG uses Bing search results. It's also got orders of magnitude lower market share than Bing.

> DDG uses Bing search results

Source on that? Their page says otherwise: https://duck.co/help/results/sources

How long would duckduckgo have to grow at its current growth rate to become larger than Bing?

> No duckduckgo is bigger than you think.

You're right, a twelfth of the volume of Bing is insane, especially with these marks on the table (which are probably an optimistic view, but still).

Edit: changed 'inflated' to 'an optimistic view'.

This is because when I go to the start menu and start typing the name of the application I'm looking for, a large percentage of the time the Cortana search process is corrupted and my start menu is not searched, instead, I get an Edge window opened with a Bing search for "Photoshop"

I don't trust those numbers at all.

I recently learned this is possible to turn off from the settings as something like "search Internet for results". Probably the most annoying feature of windows 10, hit enter quickly enough and its always a bing search because it's too fast for local..

Here in Blighty, with a lot of companies still muddling on with the barest handle on web marketing, I've found Bing much more useful than Google for finding companies supplying materials or goods that aren't exactly 'exciting'. A lot of small - medium-sized industry output, for example.

Just this last year I've added Bing to my [hardcoded] homepage and found two 'things' that I've been hard-pushed for literally years to find a non-American/German supplier for.

It's fashionable and fun to bash Microsoft, but I can't say I'm much-amused by the utter stranglehold Google has on my internet usage otherwise (my fault, I know).

Let's give Bing a chance.

Can you give an example of what you're talking about? Or what those two things are?

One was steel blades for die-cutting. I'd been on/off looking for a LONG time, with not much from Google, my primary search engine. Thought "Why not?" so tried Bing, and 'like a violin', a couple of relevant entries popped up.

Now, full-disclosure - Google had for years offered me options for companies on the continent and across the pond, but given mine was an explanatory investigation, I wanted a local company so that I could pick their brains over the phone and order the bare minimum I needed to get me on my feet.

This was about a year ago, so it may well be now that Google has the sites I found indexed too.

- ed

...also, Google could previously find mass-industrial options here in Britain, but they were not the sort of companies I could order at my groping-in-the-dark scale from.

At the risk of being off-topic: ""Blighty" is a British English slang term for Britain or often specifically England"

Just because that might be a thing that other non-native speakers are unfamiliar with (I always thought of my English as pretty decent, and never heard of it).

Also I second the request for further information.

@topic: I find it hard to believe that Bing actually amounts to much in terms of organic searches, but that might be my filter bubble speaking.

I have recently been trying to use more different search engines, but the habit of just googling everything is hard to break. Other than the obvious candidates, can anyone recommend any search engines we are missing because google is so dominant?

Someone recently recommended https://millionshort.com/ to me, but I haven't used it enough to have an opinion on.

I'd just like to point out that "I don't like Google's monopoly on my internet usage" doesn't directly translate to "Let's give Bing a chance." Other search engines exist.

No shit?

I like the bing video search and image search. I normally get much better results with google for text searches. Does anyone find bing the best engine for anything besides video and image search?

Probably not what you meant, but it's definitely the best engine for B2B PPC advertising. It's a veritable goldmine for B2B marketing thanks to corporate policies forcing IE/Edge and leaving Bing as the default, combined with most advertisers focusing on Google instead.

I've had good luck with academic articles too. And yes, video and image search both give better results too and present them in a nicer manner with better tools too.

I have to say that I prefer Bing's image search over Google's offering once I've run out of DuckDuckGo results.

I use:

- Bing Maps for aerial imagery, or business info when I'm in a mood to go the extra mile to avoid Google. Their map is super smooth and fast.

- OpenStreetMap.org for general lookups, routing, etc.

- Google Maps for street view and, when not on OSM, business information ("where's the nearest McDonald's"). Slow, bloated, but annoyingly complete because market share.

I also have backgrounds from Bing because they're pretty and refresh daily.

I haven't looked at Bing Images in a while, that's a good one. Image search, as well as video search (Youtube), is still a Google search for me. From a first glance, it looks pretty similar except for the preview thumbnails below an enlarged image; that's nice.

IE and Edge seem to make up about 10% of market share, while the rest goes to chrome, safari and firefox, which all default to google and yahoo respectively. I'm surprised that so many people would be changing their default search engine to make bing that popular.

Bing Rewards pays people to search in the form of Amazon and other gift cards

Yeah, a cursory search of my inbox says that Bing Rewards has paid me about $165 in Amazon cards since 2012, and I've got another $20 or so in credit waiting to be redeemed.

In a world of "good enough", getting the occasional payout is incentive enough to switch from Google, especially when Firefox makes it so easy to switch engines for a query if the first search doesn't work out.

The 33% counts Yahoo, which is powered by Bing.

Yahoo search is basically a white-labeled version of Bing, and has been since 2009[1].

And Siri also uses Bing by default[2].

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8174763.stm

[2] http://searchengineland.com/apple-makes-bing-the-default-sea...

It's included in Windows search.

There are 3 types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. The short answer is that they probably aren't. There are a million ways Bing could slice this data to make them appear to have more market share than they have. I imagine Google has a completely different take on Bing's market share, it will be interesting to see if they refute the number.

Other commenters have commented on how the data is biased/cherry picked, and Google would have a different take on the market share numbers.

However, it might be more to Google's benefit to say nothing and use this as evidence of not having a dominant majority share if there is a monopoly lawsuit against them in the US. In fact, I suspect that losing the Firefox search default might actually be beneficial to Google for the same reason.

A few days (?) ago they also boasted that 70% of users are "ok" with their telemetry, or is it 30% haven't figured out how to turn it off?

Or in this case, haven't bothered to switch to Google on IE/Edge?

this is the source I could find https://m.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/09/microsofts_privacy_en...

It is entirely possible Bing's market share is improving because Bing itself has improved.

I totally understand the reason why Microsoft wants to push Bing, I do. However, unfortunately (for us Finns at least) Bing search results are simply awful, almost incomprehensibly so. I could swear Google offered a better search 15 years ago (not that the situation is fully comparable).

Add the total lack of additional features (not too long ago it lacked even a simple calculator, or at least failed to reliably show it) results in what is simply a very poor user experience for any user. My very much tech-illiterate relatives can only articulate to ask why the “search in their new computer” is so bad they always have to manually go to Google after almost any query.

I trust nothing Microsoft says. They have a history of fudging numbers and hiring PR firms to publish studies that show them as cheaper or better than they really are.

And you think Google is any better? I have lost count how many times when I try to install something and Chrome got bundled together without even prompting me. Latest version of CCleaner is a prime example.

Bing is my go-to search engine when I'm in China, and don't have access to a VPN. Most of the time, it gets the job done just as good as Google. Sometimes the results are even a bit better, but sometimes much worse, with the results not relating to the thing I'm searching for at all. It's hard to describe and I don't have an example at hand, but it's these failures that make it really frustrating. Sometimes I wish you could report a search as particularly bad, so that some human employees would have a look and manually move the for humans obviously correct result to the top.

When I am cyberstalking (or want aggregate information about any particular topic) I use Bing.

On the other hand, Google makes waaaaay too many assumptions about what I want. When I really want to scour the internet.

Yahoo is only used in the US, in Europe it's all about Google.

I use Bing, its nice to support someone that competes with Google to avoid that company getting a complete monopoly.

They also give rewards so I get my $5 voucher every few months which is handy.

This! I recently decided to try out Bing purely to see if comparing the results of both engines resulted in disparities like I had seen in the past. I was presently surprised to see that Bing results were pretty much on par with Google in my most common type of searches. The rewards program was a nice little bonus on top of it and decided to give them a try. The results are good quality. It isn't as fast as Google but not slow enough to halt my experiment.

Mostly, I like the competition idea. If using Bing for a while keeps Google on their toes and helps improve Bing as well, then I think its a win, win, win.

I have seen analytics data for dozens of big sites and I have never seen numbers to even remotely support 33% to Bing. I have little doubt that MSFT is basing this on some form of data, but I'm guessing there is a twist or caveat in here somewhere. EDIT: For content sites and e-commerce sites, I see ratios that are between 18:1 and 50:1 for Google:Bing. Long way off from 33%.

I've consistently seen searches coming from Google at >95% of search hits on all my blogs. Where are these invisible Bing searchers?

they aren't using Bing to search for your blog, they (i.e., my mother) are using Bing to search for Google.

Probably not in your demographic.

So to aggregate assertions in this thread, Bing powers:

  * Bing.com web searches
  * Yahoo.com search engine backend
  * DuckDuckGo.com search engine source
  * Windows Start Bar results
  * Default search engine for IE/Edge
  * Default search engine backend for Firefox
  * Amazon Echo web searches
  * Siri web searches
  * Facebook search bar web searches

Probably a large part of that is because they are much more permissive to bots/crawling than Google searches.

Someone please explain how to search for exact phrases on Bing like you can with quotation marks on Google. I've seen some claim that quotation marks work the same way on Bing, but it isn't true.

Has anyone seen numbers with bing search ads that make this at all likely?

I know that my experiments with bing search ads were cheap but so low volume that it wasn't even worth bothering with.

What percentage of those are people typing "google"?

Are there any substantial blogs out there covering the technology behind search engines, including hypotheses about how Google works?

(I'm talking about real research, not SEO)

I'm not surprised - you'd be amazed at how many 'regular people' have their browser set to return Bing or Yahoo results

Bing / Yahoo make up 1.6% of our organic serp traffic and ranking is not an issue. add: for the past week, according to ga.

Bing search results are similar enough to Google's these days (for non technical searches) for this to not be a surprise

huh, Wait to get a load of Microsoft research. Microsoft combined its research branch with its search branch last year if I remember correctly.

And Microsoft research is far superior compared to others. Just look how many people with h-index 50+ does work at Microsoft and compare it with Google.

Why are countries like Paraguay, Uruguay, Russia, and Panama not on their maps?

what is defined as a search? searching within social networks is most definitely a 'search' but probably not counted. I would estimate almost half my daily searches are on a social network.

Bing doesn't seem to have SSL enabled by default. That's weird.

Is Siri search counted in the stats?

Most probably... They'll use anything they can to boost their market share numbers.

Is it really as nefarious as you make it seem? Is Google allowed to count the number of browser that have Google search built in? Are they allowed to count Android phones where Google search is the default? Why would Bing not be able to count searches done on there just because they're done via Siri?

I'm not saying it's nefarious, I'm just saying they're desperate to show as large a market share as they can claim to. I used to work at Microsoft on MSN and helping Bing boost its numbers by all means necessary was job #1 by the time I left. Some of the means were not quite kosher.

I switched to ddg and know lots of others who did too. DDG uses Bing.

My understanding is that Duck Duck Go uses a whole bunch of sources, including but not limited to Bing.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

qwant.com another privacy focussed search engine augments results with Bing.

Only bigger than you think because of the massive population of people who don't know how to change their web browser search provider, or their web browser altogether.

Before google they were running higher than 33%. They fell down flat on their faces because of the union of greed, technical illiteracy, and market illiteracy among managers/leaders.

Wait, before Google search existed Bing was doing better with search results? I don't think Bing existed back then. Even MSN search didn't exist back then.

Google predates Bing by 11 years. As for Microsoft they got slapped down by the government. The same thing google is starting to run into now.

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