Microsoft's Bing hopes to bag market share with ... search apps Microsoft’s director of search Stefan Weitz has admitted that Bing.com probably can’t compete with Google’s search engine in a head-to-head race, but reckons Redmond's a contender in search applications. Stefan Weitz, director of search at Microsoft “The question is, where is search really going?” he said at the Web Summit …
...is a good thing for the perpetuation of human knowledge, because the average Western person's blind reliance on Google as a universal arbiter of all knowledge is frightening.
However, on a completely unrelated topic, doesn't it look like the gentleman in the photo loves his hair so much, that like noblemen in the 17th century, he hasn't had a shampoo in years? It looks like there's a worm crawling down the right side of his face...
why Microsoft continues to piss away money on a service that either nobody wants, changes immediately after they get their pc's or openly mocks. They really need to decide on which core product lines to focus on and go after them with a vengeance, because they've lost a LOT of momentum because of Ballmer and a lot of, quite frankly, stupid mistakes. Bing being one of many.
They do it because allowing Google to control so many areas of the web leads to them being at a competitive disadvantage. Take YouTube for instance. It is by far the market dominant site for sharing video. MS wanted to build a YouTube app for Windows Phone. In fact they did, and complied with all Google's TOS and just wanted to make one feature equivalent to those on Android and iPhone. Google blocked them because YouTube is owned by Google and Google also control the mid and low-ends of the Smartphone market, where Windows Phone was trying to become a competitor. So Google were trying to squash it.
That's why MS try to establish themselves in this area and not rely on Google - because any dominant market player abuses their dominance to keep out competition in their affiliated areas. MS did it back in the day. Google are doing it now. Apple do it with their phones but aren't services orientated so it's limited in scope. It's just protecting yourself.
Bing has almost[1] 30% of the US[2] desktop[3] market...
provided we also include Yahoo in their numbers (at approx 10%) which uses the same engine. Unfortunately for them, for the Yahoo use they get no revenue, in fact they have to pay[4] them.
[1] "Almost" is "not" spelled with six letters.
[2] Globally, Bing is "almost" as big as Yandex.
[3] So not including this newfangled "mobile" stuff.
[4] The payments accounted for 25% of Yahoo's revenue for 2013.
... is one area where Bing definitely exceeds Google. Google Translate looks like it's been abandoned, and still has a nasty habit of randomly inverting the sense of German sentences that use "es sei denn" (="unless" in English), or simply transliterating Japanese hiragana rather than translating the words written in them.
Google has a very good index, but that doesn't mean that everything else they do is equally good.
I've compared results and not seen much difference between the two, tried the Bing Vs Google tests and found the results quite similar, plus I like the daily changing photos, I use it on my Windows PCs and my windows phone. I just wish they would let us UK users have access to Bing Rewards.
The translation function works fantastically in twitter as well, at least I assume it does, what it translates seems to make sense at least.
2 years ago I had to search Microsoft's own website for some information. Since Bing is a Microsoft product I figured it would be best in searching a Microsoft website. Bing wasn't really doing a good job. So I tried Google with "site:microsoft.com" and I found what I needed faster every time. I eventually concluded that if Bing has trouble with Microsoft searches, it will be even worse for WWW searches. I know this was 2 years ago so I do not know if Bing has improved searching microsoft.com or not.
After every Patch Tuesday I click the More Information links to go to the KB article, get 'Oops!' because Microsoft haven't put the article up yet, copy the no. into the Bing search field, select 'Downloads', and regularly get 0 results. Half the time if I then put the same KB no. into Google I get a link to the Microsoft download.
It didn't used to be like that. It used to be the links worked from 6pm (GMT). And there was no Bing.
There was Friends, though. It wasn't in Seattle, but there was a coffee shop. They could have called it 'Niles'.
Or 'Punxsutawny Phil'.
"Ive compared results and not seen much difference between the two,"
That's not my experience. I've been doing the same searches every day these weeks because we've got municipal elections and I've got some new sites up. So, I just now did similar searches, and variations, on Bing. There's not much there compared to Google. I think part of the problem is that Bing seems to take a year to gather all the links. I say that because things that have been up for a couple of years seem to show up just fine. Google picks up new sites in a day or so without any effort on my part, and updates sometimes show up within minutes. In my opinion, and probably most people's, that's better than waiting a year when it comes to things like news and elections.
Fire up IE, type in the search string whilst it's loading up and trying to render whatever crap is the homepage, hit enter and the results appear in bing. ctrl+x the search phrase and type google, click the link and ctrl+c. Ok you could fire up IE, hit stop, type google.com (but whilst you're typing IE will probably reset the URL anyway) and then do the seach but this kinda crap catches you out doesn't it?
I like Bing - there I admit it... especially their beautiful photo's each day. Good to see photographers being supported in this manner.
I don't dislike Google, but I do dislike how they monitor what I search and then I get adverts popping up all over the place using those terms. Better than getting random adverts though I suppose... I use Bing by default and move to Google when I cannot find what I want... even then I am not guaranteed to find what I want.
Bing is the underdog, we all know it. I find it amusing that many of the innovations Bing has implemented to try and get market share, Google has copied (seems like they have forgotten how to innovate). Example for this is the image search and continually scrolling page.
If Microsoft supported Firefox, so that Bing became the default search engine for Firefox, it would be interesting to see how much market share they would steal... So many home users have no idea what a search engine is and use the one that was installed last time they visited a page.
Sad to see so many workplaces defaulting the search engine to Google (hell, in my current workplace, I cannot even change the search providers) and putting links on their intranets to Google (apparently staff struggle to use web browsers).
Actually, Bing has been copying Google for years (eg, hiybbprqag) - you probably see it in Bing first because you don't use Google. But I don't care who copied who, just who provides it better - being inspired by someone else, and improving on it, is good for all of us (unless you're Apple).
Microsoft paying Firefox wont make a dent in their market share. Most people who use Firefox are the types to use what's best for their needs, rather than what's pushed upon them - otherwise they wouldn't even be using FF.
The reason people make Google their default (computers now come with Bing as default) is because it's actually useful to them. Google know more about them than any other on-line provider, which lets them serve the better search results. For those who don't base their opinions on what they read on IT forums, that is a feature.
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Frankly the mind boggles. Bing is appalling enough as it is, and I dread to imagine what it would spit out with natural language. If MS are true to form they'll merely move the goalposts and change the language to suit bings 'talents' and expect the rest of us to adopt as a national language -
"Microsoft Enhanced English*, especially re-engineered for the 21st century, and now containing 95 percent fewer words and incredible MS SimpleGrammar! So simple even an MS exec can use it! (*Note - may be incompatible with non-MS versions of English. WARNING: do not use when instructing others to use heavy machinery or where safety of life is an issue!!)"
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