Reasons to use Bing | Hacker News Reader

Reasons to use Bing

philosophicalgeek.com

18 pointspepethecow24 comments

how does this get upvoted?

> I work for Bing

really.

the majority of the features listed that make bing "better" are in google. the rest are either entirely subjective, or re-hashes of the previous "feature".

if you love emacs/linux/bing/zsh/ps4/some-other-well-known alternative-to-a-mainstream-product and use it, great, but this sort of fanboy-ism is how heated and petty "wars" start out on the internet. and we do not need another one of those. please.

I like that there's competition, that drives improvement of everyone's product.

To me though, improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my privacy. For this reason, DuckDuckGo wins hands-down. They may not have top notch search results [yet], but I'm happy to help them get there since they respect my privacy more than Google or Bing, who seem like they're just competing with each other and ignoring the privacy aspect.

I agree about the competition, I'd much rather have a larger percentage of people using Bing than there is currently for that reason alone. However, for other reasons such as you mention, DuckDuckGo is clearly the one to root for.

I've never considered this before but as I don't own or run any Microsoft devices or services, I'm finding the use of Bing as my search engine very appealing from a privacy perspective.

As they have zero knowledge of my identity, I don't see any issue with using them. Any reason not to use them compared to DDG as Bing may have better search results?

"improvements I'm looking for most revolve around respecting my privacy"

Bing's privacy policy is far from perfect, but it's more informative than Google's privacy policy. Here's an example extract from Bing's privacy policy

"We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, email address and phone numbers. We have technological safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorised correlation of this data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, and cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months."

They also clearly tell you that wiping your search history doesn't mean erasing it from their search logs:

"For Bing Search in your browser, using the search terms you enter and the results you click, search history provides an easy way to revisit the sites and searches you've used before. You may clear your search history from appearing on the site by following the steps provided here or by going to the Bing preferences page noted above. Clearing your history removes it from the Search History service and prevents that history from being displayed on the site, but does not delete information from our standard search logs..."

http://www.microsoft.com/privacystatement/en-gb/bingandmsn/d...

Now compare that to Google's privacy policy which tells you nothing about whether your data is anonymised and for how long your data is kept. And all this from a company that does associate your search activity with your account (the one with with your date of birth, gender, location and possibly phone number). Remember too that Google arguably tracks and records online behaviour more than anyone else. Given the staggering amounts of data they collect, you'd think that would give them the impetus to be more informative about how they use your data, but it's quite the opposite. Their privacy policy tells you very little:

https://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/policies/privacy/

I recently used ddg at uni without adblock and it is horrible. They have no problem serving phishing sites just above legitimate ones with very little indication that they are adverts.

Reasons 2,3,4,5 and 6: photographs in the background. What's that got to do with search?

Thanks for saying this. I'm glad I'm not the only one who found this odd.

Ok, I did a test. "zero to one" in Google - all results on the first page are book related. In Bing - not even ONE result is about the book, instead I got things like "0 (number)" (Wikipedia), "nhibernate - Modeling one to zero or one" (a stackoverflow question), a clock named "onezero", "Zero Hour" movie on imdb... It's in 'related searches' but that's it.

Not book related results are ok, but not even one book related link in the first five pages? I think I will stay with Google for now.

(I did this in private mode to disable Google search personalization).

edit: Ok, Bing starts showing the book when I change location to United States. Default results are these [0]. Seems they really need to work on their location-related personalization, these results are complete trash.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/v5LqSBB.png

https://www.bing.com/search?q=zero+to+one&go=Submit&qs=n&for...

i got book results...first link is to amazon for buying the book.

Tried it again in incognito. Same results.

I just did but both shows quite the same.

There were only reasons I found compelling: 10, 12, 15, 20

10 Google has to a certain extent, but I've not seen anything as interesting as digging into the individual pose of a picture.

12 I typically use wolfram for. 15 I have yet to have a need for. 19 is interesting, but not something I particularly have use for.

In every other case, the reasons were irrelevant to me (echoing the IDGAF towards all the background-photo related "reasons") or the feature is present in Google. Often better.

So... for me, Google still is my search engine of choice. Especially in regards to reason #1. I took the bingiton challenge, and In every instance of a search query I actually make on an everyday basis, Google either won or tied with bing. Most of those searches are code-related.

49. Porn, especially video search.

I dislike Microsoft and their evil ways, but Bing has its uses.

Bing is currently very useful for images and videos. I find its much more accurate then Google. Both of these search fields are far ahead of google.

Currently I use Google for my text based information searching. It actually uses deliminators +/- site: *.pdf etc. these are very powerful tools, that bing doesn't support. And rarely used by most users I assume.

But if I want to find a reaction image, funny (or illicit) video. Bing wins out.

Huh. Bing has definitely improved, but half of the features listed by the author don't seem to work for me. Am I doing it wrong?

Further, I almost always get better results from Google. If I search for "pizza" on Bing, the top local result is an obscure restaurant a few miles away with a one-star rating. The ones that are close to me and have high ratings are at the bottom or not even listed.

Occasionally I try Bing and usually find that it doesn't yield very relevant search results. I almost always have to switch over to Google to find what I'm looking for. Plus it drives me crazy that you have no way of specifying you only want current results (within the past year). Bing sucks, Google doesn't.

Google is still much better when searching for non-purchase non-torrent downloadable music, movies, and ebooks. Plus Google has those convenient links to chilling effects, which, when the site is available, surprisingly provide pretty close to direct links to what I was looking for.

A thing that I find really useful in Google search that Bing does not offer (at least by default), is that it shows you the PDF's creation date. Eg.:

>Aug 10, 2010 - 2. 1. This paper examines the implications of the Fund accepting membership in the.

The following is not a reason not to use Bing for others, but (just saying): almost none of these features work for me in Finland. Seriously, there was not even a calculator available a while back.

Maybe Bing has improved lately, but a year or so ago I tried it for a while and was not impressed. However, more recently I tried using DuckDuckGo and find it pretty excellent. It's surprisingly useful for esoteric developer-y stuff I'm often searching for. Since iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite offer it as a default search engine option in Safari, I've been using it full-time. I only rarely access Google for web searches now, which is pretty awesome.

Within the first ten, he lists the wallpaper image as about five of them. Many of the items on the list are the same as what Google does. While he says Bing does as well or better in some areas, he never mentions the opposite, that Bing does less well than Google in others (and how many others?).

These aren't reasons to switch to Bing. It's an advertisement.

I haven't checked in a year or so but, last I heard, Microsoft loses about $2 billion dollars every year on Bing.

Not only those features are done by Google exactly the same way, but the fact is, bing copied most of them (if not all) after Google did it - including blindly copying their search results directly from Google - as everyone here might already know(http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/02/01/microsofts-bing-caugh... ).

It's probably a propaganda post, I'm not sure how it even got 13 points (at present).

Propaganda?! I am sure, I am not on politico. There were some valid reasons to use Bing, and I use bing for Bing Rewards and donate the points to my local elementary school for Microsoft to donate Surface to them (even though I am far far away from the target). If Google works for you that is great, but the difference in terms of result quality is not stark, but perceptions have stuck and bing is suffering from that.

Bing is horrible.

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