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Comment by yegg | Hacker News Reader

From lots of experience, I can tell you if you don't have these things (and others, this is an incomplete list just off the top of my head) showing up in the right places (often above "traditional web links") at the right times then you cannot get long-term search engine adoption from mainstream users:

- maps

- directions

- local business listings

- about boxes

- basic facts

- conversions

- news

- videos

- images

- shopping

- sports

- stocks

- weather

- flights

- entertainment (e.g. cast)

- etc.

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I understand that you need these to be a full "search engine".

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.

Gabriel, could you please clarify once and for all: for "traditional web links", how much do you rely on bing? The user consensus seems to be 100%. What is the official number from you? Thanks!

The previous statement seems to answer that reasonably well.

> 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.

> but not for all and even when we do it sometimes looks different in various ways

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.

I also want a % for traditional web links (ignoring all the non-web links pushed to the top). Is it 80%? 60%? 99%? "Primary source" means what?

It’s unlikely to even be possible to break it down as simplistically as a %

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