Microsoft says : "Bing is now as good as Google"
wired.com
wired.com
I feel like search queries can be divided broadly into two categories: general and specific. General queries are things like "what is python" or "java tutorial". These are subjects that are well known and have a lot of relevant information on the web. Specific queries are queries things that you and maybe a few hundred people in the world have ever encountered. Think: really esoteric programming erors.
What I believe - and I don't have any hard facts to back it up past my own experience, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt - is that Bing excels in the first category but not the second.
The other day I was doing some schoolwork involving SSL, where I had to write a man in the middle proxy. I ran into this really bizarre error message: "valid not before not set." I had no idea what it meant, and since I was using a proxy SSL server for the assignment I ended up using bing to search for it - no results. Google has exactly 1 result for that phrase, but it's the one that you need to get back on track.
This happened often throughout the project. Bing gives pretty good results; I certainly don't wish to disparage the website. But whenever I started running into really esoteric or weird bugs, Google turned up the right page time and time again. Bing felt like it was taking a hazy guess at the right answer.
These are the specific queries, and this is where Google stays ahead. I've used Bing in the past for a month or two; I've also used duckduckgo. Both are very good. I certainly don't consider myself anything of a google fanboy, for that matter. But when it comes to specific queries, I still can't find a search engine that holds a candle to Google.
Now I switched away from Google due to privacy issues so Bing does nothing to improve that. I have a little more faith in Duckduckgo, but it is definitely lagging on features and relevance for me so I don't know how long it's going to be my default search.
And for programming, Duck Duck Go is the best because you append !so and it takes you to stackoverflow. Google values SO scrapers higher than SO.
That said, if you don't learn the shortcuts, you are missing out.
Also, after listening to a talk by Stoyan Stefanov (it's on IT Conversations) I realized that what makes Google so useful subconsciously is their subsecond response time. This is my biggest problem w/ ddg.
That said, I went to a meetup tonight by an Xoogler. He was mentioning that they have an internal query tool that will query a trillion records in a second. I wonder if Bing has the same...
Wasn't this fixed years ago? I haven't seen SO scrapers in ages, and I get a lot of SO results from both my personal and work Google accounts. (I definitely blocked them from my personal account ages ago, but I've never blocked anything from my work account.)
Every time it just reminds me and I'm thinking like "guess who's not logging my keystrokes and clicks this time mwahahaa." :-)
There's always the point, though, that you can't be "just as good as" an entrenched player to win. You've got to change the entire nature of the playing field.
So long as MS doesn't do that, it's "lost" (for certain definitions of lost that include making hundreds of millions of dollars).
There's probably interesting things to say about it if we can avoid the rut of the old familiar "which of /Google|Microsoft|Apple|Facebook/ will winner-take-all in the market battle with for /Search|Advertising|Desktop|Mobile|Social/" discussion.
Generally though I use more specialized search engines for my day to day work and with things like DDG and !bang syntax I can get to where I need more quickly.
I'm going to just go out on a limb here and say this statement is false. They can't even index pages you tell it about.
(If you're curious my site is http://socialblade.com/youtube and the 1.2 million plus pages indexed are statistics on youtube channels)
Oh, please. This site is a content farm. You've even have placeholder images saying "ADVERTISE HERE". Why should Bing - or Google - index this? What value does a search result to your site give to a user who most likely is searching for actual videos?
Time for duckduckgo
Whoever finds either the most up-to-date or most results about me in the first page of results, gets my (reluctant) vote as my default search engine.
This is not because of any particular vain reason but my name is esoteric enough to be almost unique and with time, despite my careful attempts, I have ended up leaving a significant Internet trail.
Fortunately, only one search engine always finds details about me: Google.
Bing shows ZERO results about me, after even 10 default pages!
However, I would still use Google over other search engines for one reason alone: date-ranged searching. This is very useful for many reasons.
To each their own.
First, why should you believe them? Second, even if they're right, why does it matter? "As good as" isn't a good enough reason to switch for most people.
I think this is the problem, by playing catchup, innovation has taken a back seat. Being on par with google is a subpar goal for a competitor.
It's somewhat similar to google plus trying to catch up to facebook.
Uhm.. Google?
Easiest. Quiz. Ever.
If you're not the dominant player, you want to make sure you can back your claims up though, because if customers try it once and they find the claim to be wrong, they'll never try it again.
Edit: I went back and actually reread what GP said and realized I was wrong if interpreted literally, but I took it to mean something more like "you know you're currently losing when you compare yourself to the competition". But yeah, my bad, you're definitely right under the literal interpretation - Apple didn't lose and may actually win at the end.
That's a painful number. I wonder what Facebook's image data store is up to these days.