Bing just crashed | Hacker News Reader

Bing just crashed

techcrunch.com

21 pointsaresant17 comments

Anyone want to estimate how much money they just lost?

Excluding the negative press, let's upper bound what it means to lose 1/48 (= 30 minutes) of one day's revenue. Google's yearly revenue is dominated by search + Adsense. That was about $5.5 billion in Q2 2009 (from Googling "Google revenue") so about $22 billion over all.

Dividing through gives:

(22 * (10^9) dollars) / (365 days * 48 (half hours)/day) = 1 255 707.76 dollars / (half hour)

Hence an upper bound is that Bing lost about $1.3 million dollars for this downtime.

Bing is not doing as much business as Google, that Google number includes all kinds of other things besides search, and it was after 5pm US time (all of which will adjust the number down). Still, an expensive error, and this of course doesn't factor in the negative press.

You really need to be able to estimate the lower bound of the loss to know if it was in fact "expensive" though, don't you?

>> Bing is not doing as much business as Google

Understatement of the century.

Given Bing cashback, might they be net saving moeny while down?

That's one way to drive traffic to Bing...

I hope they get it worked out. For me, bing feels like the little rubber life-raft on the good ship Google. I don't want to use it, but I like knowing its there... just in case.

Give them a pass because they are new. And search going down is less important than email going down.

Email has no replacement. Search does.

Do they really qualify as being "new" every time they rebrand MSN Search? That seems overly generous to me. Google rolls out updates all the time too; they just got the branding right the first time.

I'm sick of the radio ads already.

"Bing! The NEW search engine". Not a mention that it's a rebrand of a crappy microsoft search.

Great minds think alike ;)

Actually, Bing is mostly a rebranding of Live Search, which has been around for a long time.

Back after 30 minutes of downtime.

It required me to fill out a captcha before reentry.

I'm surprised anyone noticed.

I kid you not, the bing background right now that loaded for me is a Whale Shark LOL!

Looks like it is from this: http://vimeo.com/hd#5606758

It's quite funny. Search for bing on bing, and you can see how ridiculously incompetent they are:

"Bing - Search. Explore. Decide. ... Pardon the interruption. We ask that you view the characters in the following picture and enter them in the box below. www.bing.com · Cached page"

That's not a good summary.

Search for 'google' on google:

"Google - Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results, and an option to find similar pages"

edit: Do you seriously think the above summary of bing, by bing is good?

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