Bing is nowhere near "(Just as good as G)". If it was, a lot more people would have already switched. As of now, it's surprisingly behind Google in almost all but the most basic searches.
Not just in the filter bubble sense of keeping out any info that the targeted user might find unpleasant, but also in the sense that "we don't surface anything outside of very recent, very mainstream, large corporate sites" even when that's exactly what I don't want to sift through on a given search.
It's a real pain if you're trying to do research in a niche area or in an academic field that isn't hip and popular, if you're not in the 90% bracket of the distribution results for what people click on you just don't exist on Google anymore.
This phenomena is most obvious when you're searching for something that you know still exists on the web, you can remember it being a top result years ago, but has now been effectively eliminated from the results because it's not sitting on the domain of a large corporation. Bing will still surface these sites, at least for now.
> Not just in the filter bubble sense of keeping out any info that the targeted user might find unpleasant, but also in the sense that "we don't surface anything outside of very recent, very mainstream, large corporate sites" even when that's exactly what I don't want to sift through on a given search.
I think this is why many people perceive Google Search to be "better." Those people are mainly looking for mainstream topics on a small number of mainstream sites, and Google has heavily biased their algorithm in that direction.
> It's a real pain if you're trying to do research in a niche area or in an academic field that isn't hip and popular, if you're not in the 90% bracket of the distribution results for what people click on you just don't exist on Google anymore.
> This phenomena is most obvious when you're searching for something that you know still exists on the web, you can remember it being a top result years ago, but has now been effectively eliminated from the results because it's not sitting on the domain of a large corporation. Bing will still surface these sites, at least for now.
You can also try using DDG or Google Verbatim mode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12045959. Though, IMHO DDG is about as good as Google Verbatim.
And when you also factor in that you're not helping Google build a profile on you, it's better than Google.
DDG uses other search engines for results (such as bing), so unless you agree Bing is improving, it’s just a placebo.
DDG is only useful because we can all fall back on g!. It’s sad but true. There is still no substitution for Google search.
This doesn't prove anything. Unless you can provide some metric to say it's not good, then it's delusion getting the better of you.
DuckDuckGo is good enough for everyday usage, for me. It has been this way for well over a year. I never use bangs.
The one place it's really currently lacking is in rejection of spam sites.
DDG is so good that I use GOOG maybe once a year as a secondary search engine. And I started with GS since it had a comically-terrible interface in 2000. I switched because they went evil and DDG was more than good enough being privacy-focused. The !bang searches are a big innovation and timesaver that sealed the deal.
But for some searches I do have to do that. E.g. searching for a HN discussion from the last week: usually no hit. Also image and video search yield surprisingly little results. This last thing is my biggest complaint on DDG.
I do still use Google on my work PC, because it knows I'm a C++ programmer and can show more relevant results. I am against the direction tracking is going, but it is useful in some cases.
Plus, people know that google search is the best, so why use something else? The problem is that they seem to "know" in the same sense that they know Kleenex are the best tissues; its all marketing.
This is not about liking the visual style of the webpage(google vs bing) or how it looks. This is about quality of results and me saving time.
This is not about me being lazy not doing "good search queries". If I can search google and get a result in 5 seconds, why would I spend 1 minute figuring out the best way to phrase something, then 3 more minutes trying different things that Bing would understand? I know there is enough information in my search, because Google understands it. Why should I add more words to it (and sometimes operators) for Bing to get it? Why should I waste my time for no reason? This does not hinder my thinking ability. It's just that Google is so good that it knows what I am thinking before I am completely done with formulating the thought. Damn, sometimes I am on a wikipedia page, I stumble upon a 4-word term unknown to me in that page, I start typing it and Google knows after 2 letters, it shows the whole complete term as a suggestion! And this happens with terms starting with very common words, so it's very likely that google just knows that most people google that exact thing after going to the Wikipedia page (since google sends me to wikipedia page from the beginning). When Bing will do these little things to aid my work, I will gladly switch.
I did try, and I do wish that Bing will get better. Right now it is simply not.
(Yes, I know there are privacy implications, and those suck. But we were talking about quality of searching...)
Finally, the quality of search results is mildly subjective the closer you get to “keyword search” and away from “text search”. Google handles this scenario the best interface wise, but quality it seems to have been going down since they introduced the knowledge base—too many unrelated bits of information being pulled in without being asked for.
I think Bing has a marketing / brand problem, as it's been the punch-line of the joke for so long.
I personally think it's actually quite good - I personally use it a lot with Safari.