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TekMol

It's a mistery to me why Microsoft does not do the simple and obvious thing to siphon of a gazillion users from Google:

Just offer a simple clean interface to Bing + ChatGPT.

Without all the visual clutter and dark patterns.

Why do they keep the foot on the break by adding all that nonsense to their search engine?

Google is bringing in $160 Billion a year with their clean search result pages.

Why does Microsoft think they need to play clumsy tricks and add stuff on top of the search results to make a buck?

I see more users coming to my sites via DuckDuckGo - which searches via Bing - than via Bing itself. And that while Bing is the default search engine on the majority of new desktops and laptops out there. And the default search engine on many new tablets. Plus they have ChatGPT integration. It's just ming boggling how Microsoft wastes all that power with a bad UI.

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> Google is bringing in $160 Billion a year with their clean search result pages.

No, Google brings in $X billion a year with all the ads and garbage they stuff in between those clean search results.

The same is true for Microsoft. There's no money to be made to run the service (let alone justify an American company's lust for growth and profit) without stuffing it full of ads to hopefully sell you something.

Yes, results+ads is what makes the search result pages.

But visit this site:

https://www.google.com

And then visit this site:

https://www.bing.com

And now tell me with a straight face that you don't see a difference.

Bing ads a ton of stuff to the "results+ads" concept that works so well for Google.

One has cute penguins in the background, both show a pop up dialog trying to get me to do something.

The layout of the results page for two sample search are almost identical.

Actually for "what is a barnacle" I think Bing wins for clarity of results.

When searching for "what dog food is the best", both Bing and Google give me an entire page full of ads before any actual results pop up.

On desktop, Google's "sponsored" marker is more obvious than Bing's, but no wheres near as obvious as it used to be when Google's motto was don't be evil.

Mobile search result ads are aggressively bad with Google, frequently I have to scroll down past a page and a half of ads before I get to actual results.

All in all, users are losing out.

What's funny about bing is that it shows me what appears to be, from UI cues, a carousel of some sort but none of the controls do anything. (It went away after a refresh)

Also crazy that they wont let me use their new AI without downloading Edge. I'm not going to change my browser just to try a search feature. Do you want to get me using your service or not? Presumably my using Edge + Bing is only a minor improvement in conversion versus me using Chrome + Bing, relative to me not using Bing at all.

If you're talking about what I think you are, I was just noticing the same bug earlier today. It seems to be fixed now, at least on my browser. In any event the carousel control arrows are supposed to be on the vertical edges of the frame. If they disappear, you can click, hold, and do a slight drag motion on the image, and the carousel controls will reappear.

The difference is entirely understandable if you look at a MSN.com page from the early 2000s: it's a search bar with links web stories around it. Bing was created primarily keep that old audience from defecting to Google.

What worked for Google in a crowded search market in the year 2000 is not necessarily going to work for Microsoft Bing in 2023.

In any case, if Google's clean design was such a differentiator, they wouldn't need to pay Apple $15bn to make it the default search engine on Safari.

They look pretty similar to me except that Bing has a giant photo of penguins. Maybe you have a different experience?

e: Oh woah if I zoom out to 90% then I see what you are talking about.

On Bing:

Hamburger menu > Customize my homepage > uncheck the 3 boxes

Same clutter as google.

Yes, you can complain about the default, but Bing makes this pretty darn easy.

Without tracking you (no saved cookies at browser restart)?

When has Microsoft ever designed a user decent interface?

Windows 95 was the best desktop at that time.

I honestly have no issues with the current Windows 11 user interface. In fact, I like it.

And I've been through a lot of operating systems, starting on the PcJr and DOS in the 80s, and every Windows version ever released.

I'm a software engineer and occasional gamer. I use Windows every day for both my job and for everything else, and I have no issues with it.

That's why I find all of the nostalgia a little weird. Some think Windows 95 was the "peak" Windows, others point to 7 and want their "aero glass" back, others say 10 is the best and refuse to upgrade to 11, some install the old start menus in the new versions, etc.

It's the same every time a new version comes out. Eventually people years from now will look back and want to try to make their desktops the way they remember their Windows 11 desktop looking.

But this is veering off topic.

> That's why I find all of the nostalgia a little weird.

This is an often repeated excuse. It certainly isn't nostalgia. There need to be adaptations, mainly for decent scaling for higher resolution devices. But that doesn't mean the latest iterations are good. Windows 7 wasn't good either, but it was better provided you have your standard hardware setup.

Same with the start menu. I don't install the old one, but I certainly don't use the new one either. My start menu is now win + e & win + r. Because the rest ist plainly useless. Granted, this was the case since Win7 too.

It isn't that people like the new version, they just have to use it and find a way to manage. And yes, people also said that the Win95 UI was crap too.

There were some geniune improvements over time, but they are rare. I couldn't name a single one for Win11 yet. There are a lot of negatives though that even surpass the negatives past updates might have brought about.

Well there's this thing called Windows, I hear it's kind of popular.

That's like saying ads are popular because they're everywhere.

Well I don't see how that's wrong. They are a popular way for businesses to promote their goods and services. A city may be a popular tourist destination, just not for those that live in it. Same principle.

Microsoft Office too I heard.

popular isn't necessarily decent.

The decent part was inherited from 20 years ago. The new UI changes have generally been detrimental.

It got to a point where I'm contemplating (but too lazy) to switch my gaming PC to Linux

They design great stuff... and then cram it full of b*** sh**

My Microsoft-branded Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard is fantastic. I have no idea if they designed it or build it, though. And even the tilted mouse that it came with is really good. Their previous ergonomic keyboard 4000-something, was also fantastic.

They are not conventional keyboards, they have slightly-updated interfaces including larger meta keys, a split hand layout, tenting and reverse tilting, integrated palm rest, and some other niceties. Yes, Microsoft is capable of shipping a decent user interface. Just not in software. ))

Turns out there are different classes of people with different preferences. There will ALWAYS be some customers unhappy with their decision, and they will typically be the loudest. The fact that you see more users hitting your site from DuckDuckGo than Bing is a pretty good indicator that this audience is not typical, since Bing usage is generally much higher than DDG.

Because they want to advertise they add FeATurES. There is no concern for utility and simplicity because this is not gonna bring users anyway, and it is nothing to really advertise.

All this modern corporate bullshit is just unbearable.

If your website’s target audience is tech related then it’s not surprising that DuckDuckGo is the origin regardless of bing being installed as the default search engine on windows machines/edge.

> with their clean search result pages.

What clean result pages? You posting from 15 years ago?

Microsoft makes an absurd amount of revenue already from Office and Azure. I say it's good that their software interfaces are more awkward than Google's, otherwise they would soon dominate everything.

> Google is bringing in $160 Billion a year with their clean search result pages

I see nothing clean like “10 blue links” when I search for “bicycles”

> via DuckDuckGo - which searches via Bing

But not solely with Bing. DDG aggregates from many different sources, including what their own spider finds.

That's the story, but I doubt it.

Show me a query for which DDG has different results than Bing.

Exactly. This "fact" gets repeated so often, but it's probably only technically true. e.g. DDG = Bing + crawl of top 500 sites that DDG does once a month

I was just taking DDG's word for it, but it wouldn't take that much to convince me that they were lying. Especially since they disappeared the page that listed all of their sources.

No. Currently only Bing. As far I'm aware, it got data from Yandex years ago, but that stopped after the war.

the new bing search isn't that bad, at least on the iphone

Have you seen the start menu?

Of Windows? No. I don't have Windows. What does it do?

Spams you with ads and cross sells you bing content

comments like these strengthen my resolve to go down with the win10 ship then return to macOS when apple's chip line has matured

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