Apparently Bing Is Something Of A Hit
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I must admit I've just started to do the same and am getting the same result. I quickly added bing and its not sucking...
.. as someone who wrote off Microsoft only a few months ago and still on my "Fuck yeah, open source! Fuck Microsoft!" high, I'm feeling a little conflicted.
Well done Microsoft.
As for bing, I gave it a shot. After switching to the US version it was a whole new product. My biggest complaint so far is the lack of intelligent porn-searches :P
Using Google for search makes Google money. Google reinvests a not-too-shabby amount of that money back into open source software. Ergo, using Google search promotes open source.
Sad, really.
I recently switched from Windows to Linux after having become disillusioned with Microsoft's ability to ship a product that worked reasonably.
Therefore, the "yay open source, boo microsoft" sentiment was based off that.
Now, having tried the Windows 7 beta and now bing... I might have to rethink that position on MS's ability in software development.
(I just know someone will say "but they've just bought all that new search technology, Google is still better" or something similar... so to cut you off at the pass, Google also has acquisitions regarding search, so your argument will be invalid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions)
It's because most new products fail. Whether they're developed by a startup or a big company. But big companies have the luxury of a lot of cash that they can use to buy the products that are already successful. If you compare internal efforts that have to pass through Sturgeon's Law vs. acquired startups that have already passed the "successful" filter, of course the ones that are already successful will be more successful. It's a tautology. ;-)
Google is actually doing better than most big companies, with at least three internally-developed products that are big hits (Search, GMail, and Orkut).
Sometimes MS make some pretty damn good products.
I honestly cannot think of a time in the past year where Google has failed to locate sufficiently relevant information for a given query. If Google ever disappoints, I'll definitely fail over to Bing, but those days will be few and far between.
(And I do have a few presentation nits with Bing. I've seen a sponsored links block inserted ~250ms after the results rendered, immediately shifting the result positions and interrupting my skimming of the page. I can't open image results in tabs using Chrome, and their content wrapping for image results, Wikipedia pages, etc. feels a bit heavy-handed).
(mind you, that's out of 15,000 searches according to my Google search history)
There's also the general problem of too many commercial pages when you're trying to get information, not a product. However Bing, et al, seems to suffer from the same thing.
(eg, try finding out information about the Shoreline Amphitheatre VIP lounge experience. There are sites out there which discuss it, but it took a ridiculous number of permutations of search terms to finally find them)
If Bing is "good enough", then Google could have a big problem.
Are you worried about corporate shenanigans, or a single point of failure or something entirely else?
The hegemony of a single organization which has a clearly stated philosophical viewpoint with a desire to index all information quite simply poses risks which others have described better than I can claim to. By diversifying those risks I hope we can reduce the potential problems.
I'm not saying that Microsoft is the antidote, just that I am glad to see competition. I hope there is more forthcoming.
From an economic standpoint, it's probably most important to search engine advertisers.
given some more time to chisel away at it, MS might have something which could seriously compete with google in the future.
But even comparing US modes across both search engines shows Google to be better. For example, try scala tutorial, symbolic algebra system, and iphone app reviews.
$ curl collison.ie/code/bing-safari-patch.rb | ruby
(Of course, you should read the code before running it.)
I'm using Safari version 4.0 (5530.17)
PS: Some of the differences are just funny. Retric in Google = Hacker News profile, Retric in Bing = Slashdot Profile.
Slashdot has been around for over a decade. It has a PageRank of 9 versus 6 for HN. I would imagine Bing has a similar metric for measuring the popularity of a site. It seems to make sense that the Slashdot profile would rank higher.
What I think is really interesting is why Google ranked the HN profile higher. I'm thinking freshness is weighted much higher on Google than it is on Bing. I've done similar searches on both and while both yield relevant results I'm more likely to see older content on Bing.
These times only come into play when a competitor offers something better in some way (if there's nothing better, then these timers aren't engaged). It's like a better product is a pressure or voltage differential, and the competitive advantage is the resistance.
Of course, when you're ahead is the time to grow your competitive advantage, even though it's not needed, so that you have it when it is needed. It's an investment. The parts of the model are: the users you have; the relative attractiveness of a competing product; and what stops your users from switching.
Actually, I think this is just one kind of competitive advantage, and it only covers existing users (not new ones). For a start up, it's not enough to just retain users, you need to get them in the first place. You're better off focusing on getting them (by increasing the relative attractiveness of your product) rather than stopping them from switching... but Warren Buffett is always going on about competitive advantage - what exactly does he mean?
[ * ] for half their users to switch
The thing that will make Bing competitive with Google, however, will be the front page. Google has adhered to a simple front page with religious zealotry. Bing, on the other hand, seems to embrace making the front search page more useful. It remains to be seen if MS will clutter it up, but if Google starts adding widgets and tools to the front page, you will know they are paying attention.
Implying i was just influenced by the brand, while it may have seemed clever to you, is rude , gross ,and totally unrelated to what i said.
Unfortunately, Google is far worse in that respect. I've had occassions where my search query was automatically "corrected" to search for the exact opposite of what I want. Not too worrisome, if it weren't for the annoying fact that the only way to notice that was by finding (!) a note in normal font at the bottom of the page.
That happened a bit too often. I'm now a Yahoo Search user.
It's a reasonable competitor to Google, but I was hoping for a feature or two that would really impress me. Everything I see so far is an incremental improvement at best.
I realize that (for now) these sites are apples to oranges, but I would welcome any move by Microsoft/Google to take on Wolfram. Perhaps Bing will go this way? They have a lot of smart filtering, and the endless image search is just fun.