A week without Google Search | Hacker News Reader

A week without Google Search

jgc.org

38 pointsjgrahamc24 comments

Search engine preference depends, at least to a degree, on personal taste and this guy is entitled to his opinions, but this seems a bit contrived. He complains twice about a horizontal scroll bar when he's using what looks like a very small window. Come on.

The complaint about wasted space is a little puzzling too because in the screenshots it looks like both Google and Bing have about the same amount of "wasted space". The difference is Bing has it on the left and Google has it on the right.

The only gripe that seems legitimate is the image search and it's a bit of a stretch to call the Bing results "irrelevant". The Google image results for a "chi-square table" are clearly better, but some of the images on Bing are similar or identical.

I'm very much interested in comparisons between Google and Bing. This might be the toughest competition Google has faced so far and it's a great opportunity for us to see where search engines can improve. This article, however, is a lousy comparison. There's almost nothing of substance here.

I suspect it's a link bait article designed to plug the book that's prominently displayed on the right side of the page. That's fine, of course, but it's still a lame post.

I've been using Bing as my browser default since it came out. By and large, it's on a par with Google for most queries. I do find myself going back and forth from Google search for programming questions because of the Google groups search and blog search. The Python and Django Google groups are very active, and quite helpful. I also have found a number of links to content on programming questions via Bing that I wouldn't have found using Google alone. So, I find myself using both search engines quite a bit.

I've been planning some recent travel and the airfare search on Bing was excellent. Up until recently, Kayak was my primary airfare comparison site, but Bing's tools won big for me. They felt a faster and more responsive. You can also get airfare trend graphs and get "buy now prices increasing" or "buy later, prices decreasing" recommendations. Bing is now my primary airfare search tool.

Either way, it's great that Google is getting a little pressure to compete in search. It's been the defacto monopoly for several years, and that's bound to cause some stagnation. I think the competition is going to make search better all the way around, and it's that reason that I'm going to keep Bing as my browser default.

I've also switched my browsers search bar over to Bing. Overall, I prefer it to Google. Random notes:

- Searching for Cocoa class names doesn't give me the API reference as the first result. This is the one thing that's been annoying me.

- The image search has a nifty infinite scroll thing going on. This makes scanning through results quite a bit faster.

- I like the picture, to the extent that I tend to visit the Bing homepage just after midnight, even if I don't need to search. It's not utilitarian, but it gives Bing a flavour Google is often lacking.

I agree. I often go to Bing atleast once a day to see what pic have they put up. They have great taste specially when constrained to a limited size.

Seriously? The picture is one of the main reasons I don't like it. I find the google logo changes to usually be really interesting and clever, whilst the selection of random clip-art at bing to be a bit crass, and distracting.

I think you and I have very different definitions of clip art.

I like the photos, personally.

You can just turn it off with http://www.bing.com/?rb=0 and on with http://www.bing.com/?rb=1

I would like to see Bing do some more interesting things with this image to make it seem more like a personalised search engine.

For example, since Bing integrates with Live accounts, I'd suspect there is obviously some recording of previous searches by MS to help deliver better results.

Privacy issues aside, I think it might be quite clever for Bing's background image to be more customised to what you might enjoy based off your previous searching history.

EG, say I searched for puppies and dogs more often than the average person, having more cute puppy pictures as my background might make the engine be more appealing to me, even though I wouldn't know it directly.

I like the picture too. Now I have a longer list of places I want to visit.

On the other hand, I switched to Bing since day one and I was a happy user for the first week or so, but lately I find myself going back to Google too often. Does anyone else feels like the quality of results in Bing has been degrading?

Anyone care to try Duck Duck Go for a week and then send me some similar feedback? We're very open to ideas.

Mind pointing to a Firefox search plugin for it? Thanks. :)

Just go to http://duckduckgo.com/ and click 'Add to Firefox' at the bottom.

We also have a toolbar that blocks parked domains in addition to providing a search box: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10536

I don't see "Add to Firefox"?

http://imgur.com/FAK0O.png

Interesting. What is your useragent? It looks for firefox inside it (case insensitive). You can also get it from http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?category=66

My user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090622 Shiretoko/3.5pre. I'm using nightly builds. Got the search bar now from your other link, though, so thanks. :)

I'll give it a shot. First impression: Don't use "/" as your search box shortcut. Interferes with Firefox's quickfind shortcut.

Thanks. The '/' binding is copying Google, which they use in their various apps like Gmail.

Ah. That does make some sense, then (I haven't used Google's shortcuts much).

Apart from the trolling tone, the sole commenter suggests switching to the US version which is supposed to be better. How would one go about that, then? I didn't understand the hype about bing when first announced until I looked at screenshots - for some reason the extra features seem to be US-only.

Click on your country in the top right of the page; it will take you to a new page where you can select your market.

Google has grown less effective in many areas over the past few years. I especially hate that it no longer includes all the words in the query, which was originally one of the reasons for switching to Google. Yahoo and Bing are a little stupider in that regard, which means they let the user be a little smarter. No doubt, Google is king of the common query, but it should watch its base. If people need to go to another search engine to find something hard they might not come back for the easy stuff.

Try search.yahoo.com I find it quite good. In some nichees Yahoo is far better than Google (won't mention them because I am a tinfoil hat privacy freak, sorry). Also it seems to index XML (eg when used with XSLT) much more likely than Google.

In terms of supporting someone else, I think Yahoo is better than Microsoft, who I still don't trust all that much.

Good article...seems to come down to visual preference for the author.

But...

To use BING because its not something else (Because It's Not Google) makes my anti-anti self kick in and makes me not want to use it for the simple fact I'm not 12 years old anymore. MS needs to grow up and just release good groundbreaking innovative products like they've done for the development world.

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