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Comment by sitepodmatt | Hacker News Reader

Bing is still poor for obscure searches, e.g. today Im searching for other poor folks dealing with ebay's API and the message "Invalid store category name" in quotes. Bing 0, DuckDuckGo 0, Google plenty. Reality is most of my tech searches are like this and hence I can't give up Google, or I can at cost of either my time or my clients. It be nice to have another search engine with depth of Google but nothing comes close, it's like the old days of Yahoo directory vs AltaVista, you could never find the serialz on Yahoo.

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While Bing was poor for tech related searches in the earlier days, I find it's no longer true. Are you sure it’s 0 results on Bing? I get a bunch of relevant-looking results, and they’re all different from what Google gave me (just the first page):

https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Invalid+store+category+name...

Some weird personalization thing? Interested in seeing what others see when they click that link...

Maybe Bing is still doing this: http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-... In that case, the hacker news interest would probably get the page included in Bing, but it would take some time before everyone would start seeing it.

Did you try the search on both Bing and Google? Looked very different for Bing and Google.

Also, that accusation was purely a PR play by Google that IMO Bing refuted convincingly: http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-ac...

> was purely a PR play

Bing said they were using internet explorer to monitor users's activity and copy search results. They're still copying Google search results, just doing it through IE.

When did tracking users become equivalent to copying Google search results?

Watching what a user types into Google & using the Google result is pretty much textbook copying.

I also get a bunch of results using this query on Bing, but the first result with the exact query is #5. You need to add a "+" in front of the quotation marks to get an exact result in Bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=%2B"Invalid+store+category+nam....

I wonder why you don't get the same result in DDG since they are supposed to be pulling results from Bing (that 1 results is from April 5th, so not very recent)?

Using Google, I only get 2 results, so it is not much better...

I get no results following your link.

I got no results either, then I decided to switch my country/region to US English which resulted in a lot of results.

Rather strange to localize results so much (especially when the alternatives are showing many results vs. showing no results)

Me neither...

I get a result from wordpress.org followed by at least 4-5 from ebay's various domains.

'No results found for "Invalid store category name".'

I get one result

When I tried I got 2 results on Google, with about 7 if I selected the option to show duplicate results. Is that what you saw?

The results were all on eBay's developer forums, maybe their robots file only allows google?

One advantage to DuckDuckGo is that when searching it was fairly easy to flip and try google with !g and bing with !b after getting no results on DDG.*

It would be nice if bing/google got that feature since it's really handy, and it would be exceedingly nice if they all got the ability to add custom user defined !bang commands.

*However, annoyingly, there was a bug on ddg on iPhone that would clear the search input box when it was clicked to add !g then another error when clicking in the location bar to add the !g that the '"invalid store category name" !g' query was no longer editable instead it was the URL of the encrypted Google search making it difficult to remove the !g and add the !b.

> maybe their robots file only allows google?

It's pretty easy to check: https://forums.developer.ebay.com/robots.txt

    Sitemap: /sitemap.xml
    
    User-Agent: sitebot
    Disallow: /
 
    User-Agent: *
    Disallow: /accounts/
    Disallow: /users/
    Disallow: /revisions/
    Disallow: /search
    Disallow: /*sort=newest
    Disallow: /*sort=hottest
    Disallow: /*sort=votes
    Disallow: /commands/
    Disallow: /badges/
    Disallow: /comments
    Disallow: /storage/

Doesn't seem like anything disallows https://forums.developer.ebay.com/questions/20235/listing-it...

I've got three results (rover.ebay.*) from DuckDuckGo when I turned on region search. In every region, except "All Regions" and "United States". Yes, even in "United States (es)" there are 3 english results, but not in "United States"

What are you talking about?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Invalid+store+category+name&t=hf&i...

It popped right up on DuckDuckGo.

I admit I revert to Google for some searches, but 99%+ of the time DuckDuckGo works great.

I think the real difference between the searches are Google looks at he context per user. They have the most data and thus the best searches. At the same time I view that as a threat to sovereignty of nation(s), so for me avoiding Google is worth almost any cost.

Quote it. Im looking for the exact error message.

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