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Comment by noodle | Hacker News Reader

i have to admit, it is surprisingly good. not better than google, but it presents itself as a quality alternative. several steps up from live.

given some more time to chisel away at it, MS might have something which could seriously compete with google in the future.

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The biggest thing for me, is that it did not feel like Microsoft made it, plus it felt faster. Google 3.7s, Bing 1.57s, and actually was. Although this could change depending on how well Bing is able to scale.

You get better results by choosing US mode. Compare for example the google wave query for US and Canada modes.

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.

The results seem similar to Google. I wonder if PageRank litigation is a possibility.

possible, but that would be one hell of an epic court case. probably wouldn't even be worthwhile to try and jump into that. both sides would probably lose a lot, on multiple levels.

Yes, I was thinking PR. Odd fact: Yahoo appears to have a license for PageRank (Yahoo bought overture/goto, whose patent Google infringed with AdWords auction). GOOG-MS might cross-license too.

(Sidenote: Google search is not just PageRank. Many of the recent changes to search require more than just a better popularity metric. Obvious things are things like better stemming or stop wording which are quite tricky to get right.)

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