Microsoft executive says Google deals kept Bing small
reuters.com
reuters.com
> and that this smaller scale translated into poorer quality search.
Isn't the scale offered by Windows/Edge not enough? Other search engines like DDG, Kagi are improving their quality even with their even smaller scale.
> Tinter testified that Bing was not the default installed in any Android or Apple smartphone sold in the U.S. in the past decade, even though Microsoft would at times offer to give more than 100% of revenue -- or more -- to its partner.
If nobody is willing to take on your offer, it may be that your quality is not good enough?
If people use them, it's basically due to UI and privacy theater.
Google won not just because of comparatively quality search results, but because of minimalism. I don't need to see a picture of the day. I don't need an attention grabbing onboarding/news/suggestion box. I don't need a full menu bar. Google is very good about only polluting the search results with extra information when it is confident that that information is relevant to the search. No boxes pop out when you're scrolling down the page on google.
On google, most things that are not the results are pastel, grey, and mildly faded. On bing, everything is thick lines, vivid colors, picture based content. After doing a google search I know exactly where to look. After doing a bing search there are 6 different UI elements all doing battle for my attention. I had to scroll almost 2 full pages to get to the first result that looks like what I expect when I use search on the internet.
Bing is obnoxious, and it's asking me to cognitively process 100 different things other than the only thing I care about: my search results.
More is less.
Microsoft also has a long history of poor security, being in bed with the government, and being a hyper-corporate business-first company. Given that Microsoft is currently loading their operating system with Ads and the history of being in bed with the government (skype), how can anyone trust the Microsoft brand?
Low trust brand + bad UI + par level results = "small" service.
Nobody is actively changing their default away from google unless they think it's to a more privacy respecting search engine.
Google (privacy issues aside) is terrible in that regard as well. I just compared Bing, Google and DDG (https://duck.com) for a random query "c++ headers".
On my current resolution and scale (1980x1080, 125%) I can only see 1 result on Bing and Google before having to scroll. The rest of the screen is filled with inline answers and other irrelevant content designed to keep you on their site.
DDG on the other hand reminds me of the very old Google days, 4 results, no busy layout and when there are ads they're unobtrusive and clearly labeled.
All my devices and browsers are actively not using Google. The only Alphabet property I begrudgingly use for personal reasons nowadays is YouTube and the UI/UX there makes me run to TikTok after short sessions.
Honestly, between ChatGPT, site specific searches I rarely need to use a search engine to begin with, and when I do it's DDG for its layout and quality results.
The last few years I feel Google has become so hilariously bad at search that I didn't care and just used DDH since it promised less tracking. But still DDG and Bing weren't better IMO Google had just sunk to a level so close above them that I didn't think I missed out on anything.
Now they're trying to maintain market share through other means to keep as much risk of competition at bay as possible. That's where the anti-trust issues come into play, not on the question of whether Google is better. Ie Google leveraging their acquired scale, market power, to keep competition out to the extent possible (and obviously they could overreach to a greater extent, they could try to damage the competition even more dramatically, but that'd just make the case that much easier).
You don't get to be the best and simultaneously use your market power to deny competition access to the market, generally.
Intel vs AMD is a classic case of this in action. Intel in theory could have trivially owned the entire market, including eating Nvidia when they were far smaller. Intel had a huge size advantage over most every other semiconductor entity, for years (during the peak of their market position). They weren't allowed to do it, fortunately, due to anti-trust restrictions (either direct or perceived).
Do you really feel good about using a service located in a country that is actively attempting to carry out a genocide against another country?
And don't forget Freedom fries...
This seems like an extremely hyperbolic description of the war in Ukraine.
Since then I feel I have used Google maybe once every second month and I feel the frequency is sinking.
Its really nice to not think about M$ anymore... maybe when my kid plays minecraft.
I don't think you're supposed to say this bit out loud are you?
Microsoft are just upset that they aren't the ones with the monopoly.
In terms of making users choose an engine on their new phone ... a good UX to achieve this is by forcing them to choose once they do their first search whether via an AI assistant, web browser or etc... just show a bunch icons for a bunch of search engines to choose from. They are listed alphabetically.
Everyone who takes the money agree that they wouldn't want to use another search engine. At the same time, Apple and Google are fierce competitors and deeply in bed with each other.
"We don't want to help your business by giving you access to customers, but we would like you to pay a lot of money to get access to our customer base, which we would have done anyway"
Not necessarily. Had they not paid, Apple may have chosen to create its own search engine for safari on iOS devices. Part of this fee from Google was certainly a “don’t compete with us on this metric because we are raising the bar by $10b/year for you to bother competing”
Then browsers/apps/phones could just search on whatever engines they prefer (or several at the same time) then just display results to the user
It actually sucks that we are forced to use the whole interface of the search engines
What’s the default browser on Windows?
What’s the default search engine on Edge ?
It really only appealed to a very niche audience who understood the intricacies of the SV tech world, it was in no way mainstream the way shows like Friends or The Office.
But for whatever reason, Bing has always sounded idiotic to me. Still sounds idiotic going on 14 years.
Was the same with Zune -- just never got used to it.
I don't think we get used to everything. Some names are just bad within a given cultural context, and repeated exposure doesn't make them any less bad.
...the darndest things.
I'd bite if it was anyone else.
> Bing was not the default installed in any Android or Apple smartphone sold in the U.S. in the past decade, even though Microsoft would at times offer to give more than 100% of revenue -- or more -- to its partner
So they're mad that Google paid a bunch of money to keep them from being the default because they wanted to pay a bunch of money to keep everyone else from being the default, but Google had more money than them?
Cry me a river. Lol.
I switched to Edge and Bing when Edge started using Chromium. I used it for over a year, maybe two and had to switch away because Microsoft couldn't stop jamming stuff in my face and adding useless features.
Microsoft needs to reflect on how they're treating users instead of trying to find a scapegoat for their failures. They're not some little startup getting disenfranchised by an anti-competitive bully. They are an anti-competitive bully that failed to compete against someone on equal footing.
Yes? Because the issue at hand is the monopolistic practices of Google.
As far as classic US anti-trust is concerned, that's a gigantic standard tell, what Google has been doing to shield its market position. If you go around paying very large sums to keep competitors out, that's a classic approach to abusing market power (as the US approaches anti-trust law) that is likely to be causing harm to consumers by denying competition in the market.
It's the exact same reason Facebook isn't allowed to go around buying up all the social networks, even though on paper they easily could (they could trivially afford to have purchased: Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, etc). Google spending cash to limit competition by owning location should be viewed just the same.
Is there a source to this ? They bought instagram and WhatsApp
both products are user hostile and also not on par with the market.