> Bing is our largest source of traditional web links.
I think "traditional web links" is the main (and I think should be the only) product of a search engine, and it seems like you rely on Bing quite significantly to serve search results.
- maps
- directions
- local business listings
- about boxes
- basic facts
- conversions
- news
- videos
- images
- shopping
- sports
- stocks
- weather
- flights
- entertainment (e.g. cast)
- etc.
What we really want to know is if for links alone - what extent do you index? Let's ignore the knowledge graph, let's say we just want a simple word match.
I'm surprised you didn't have techdirt's homepage indexed at all. "techdirt" did not return "techdirt.com". To me this means you aren't indexing the home pages for popular websites at all - let alone their content - and rely effectively exclusively on bing with maybe some "caching".
Talking about links alone - exact word matches with the domain name (or page content other than your knowledge graph), what do you index?
What specifically do you do other than adding sites manually to a list and I assume "caching bings results"? To me this would still be 99.999999% ~= 100% reliant on bing for search results.
This isn't meant to be an attack in anyway, I'm just looking to clarify what's going on.
> We do use Bing as the primary source for traditional web links, but not for all and even when we do it sometimes looks different in various ways
I don't know that it's reasonable to demand that they provide you an exact percentage.
Personally I'd like to know if that means "we have a manual list we re-added". I think what myself and probably many people are most interested in is "do you rely on bing for < 95% of word match searches (no knowledge graph)"
> when we do it sometimes looks different in various ways
IMO this is also vague - I assume this means they're knowledge graph augmented? I really want to know if they have their own indexer (vs a manual list + caching bing results) for text matching.
This is context-dependent. If you're looking for a link, then you're looking for a link; but more often than not, you're actually looking for answers.
Say you're looking up an exchange rate or the value of a stock; converting units; checking the weather; or just want to look up an actor's photo. Why would you click and wait for a (likely, slow & ad-infested) page to load, if the search engine can provide factually correct data without any extra steps? How often do you read past the first paragraph on Wikipedia?
If you want to dive in / verify any of that information, it's still all just a click away. But having to only do one thing instead of two is almost the definition of technological progress.
I want room for both.
There are times I want the search engine to stop "helping" (sic) and just give me a straight search based on my terms.
There are other times where I'm looking for something specific but I don't remember exactly what it is, so I want help correcting/ narrowing down my search.