It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox Bad search results for the query "Annie Lennox first band" were among the reasons Apple rejected an approach from Microsoft to use the Bing search engine as the default in its Safari browser – and also discarded the idea of a joint venture to make Bing better or even the chance to buy the search engine outright. Those claims …
Some of them want to use use
Some of them want to abuse you
I'm not sure who would trust Google for anything after the altered reality that Gemini has been coughing out.
Anyway, DuckDuckGo: sounds like the cure is as bad as the disease.
Bing / Edge
Safari
Chrome
DuckDuckGo
All slurp user data at some level despite privacy assurances.
search.brave.com seems to be the only user friendly, non-intrusive search engine. It has become my default since the revelations about DuckDuckGo came out. Not to mention the search results from all of the aforementioned search engines are much less appropriate than they used to be. Google has really lost the plot with their search result accuracy and blindly ignores a wide swath of information, for reasons unknown.
If they aren't allowed to pay Apple to be Safari's default search engine then Apple will either go with someone else (giving them a huge funding/usage boost) or do their own search engine (they've been crawling the web for over a decade, they presumably have a search engine internally that's "ready to go" if needed, and apparently it is used for some stuff like certain Siri queries)
Neither outcome would be something Google would call a "win". They would view it as a very big loss to have that much traffic - especially traffic from customers with a higher than average disposable income - taken away from Google Search. Whatever they're paying Apple, they are obviously making a lot more than that in revenue so it will cost them real money even ignoring the competitive impact.
That's why I think Apple will just enable their own search engine which they've had cooking for over a decade. It might have growing pains, just like Apple Maps did, but nowadays almost everyone on iPhone uses Apple Maps and I think the situation would be the same with Apple Search assuming they made the necessary investments.
That would hurt Apple since it would be impossible to replace the lost Google revenue without turning Apple Search into the advertising monster Google Search is which they wouldn't want to do.
I think Google is popular enough that most Apple customers want to use Google, and would complain not having it as the default. I assume they would complain even more if it is clear that Apple switched to Bing in order to receive billions from Microsoft.
Unless Apple goes with creating their own search engine (not entirely impossible, they did just that for Apple Maps), I assume the default search engine will remain Google, and Apple will just get billions less.
I think Google is popular enough that most Apple customers want to use Google, and would complain not having it as the default.
Would they?
So many searches on Google come up with either weird short AI-derived paragraphs, that don't quite match the search query you made - or a mix of "other people searched for" or AI-generated paragraphs for other vaguely similar search queries - that most people might not notice the difference. Particularly as even when you junk all that, the next thing you come to is probably a comparison website, or Amazon link, rather than a link to the thing you were looking for.
I'd say Google are ripe for comptetition. Which could be Bing or Apple or whoever.
To be fair, Google earned the top spot, and they don't seem to be noticeably worse than the other search engines I've been experimenting with recently. They all seem to be getting worse.
Though it's about time someone asked Google just exactly how Chrome got onto all those PCs. Its market share wasn't achieved honestly.
No, it was foistware. They didn't come by that honestly.
Firstly, it was bundled with a lot of freeware and users had to opt out to not install it.
Secondly, when people went to Google or their services, they were prompted to install Google Chrome, which would make the internet faster.
I just want a search engine that does NOT include SIlly Valley BIAS in the results, whether in the order they are presented, or any additional filtering applied
The fear is that GEMINI will become "the norm:, and NO amount of DuckDuckGo search tracking mitigation will help you.
Elon has floated the idea of his OWN search engine, with an unbiased "free speech" focus. We shall see.
Thinking of Gemini, it is as if Google tried to teach the AI how to *FEEL* instead of using LOGIC. The result is a search engine that *FEELS* its results are correct, but when you remove the beer goggles, you find out just how COYOTE UGLY those results really are. "Artificial Stupidity" is the predictable result.
Ooh, burn. So, Borkzilla wanted to one-up Google, found out the hard way that it's not so easy, and is now stuck with something it can't kill because it integrated the damn thing into every part of its OS.
Sounds like schadenfreude to me . . .
M$ pushed hard to improve Bing's search results and succeeded quite a while ago. What that didn't improve was market share, but due to user inertia and due the parasitic circle jerk that SEO and the pagerank score had on driving traffic.
So as the other competitors fell, M$ has followed the standard duopoly playbook line by line. They have actually made their search results worse in step with Google doing the same, and for the same reasons, in that bad results yield more searches and offer up eyeballs for more paid placement. They like Google reward instead of punish the ranking of low quality results like reaction videos, ehow articles, and content farm garbage.
Because by following in Google's shadow, mirroring their moves, and staying just a little cheaper, they can still skim a decent chunk of money off the bottom of the search market. Never as much as Google, but a nice tidy sum. Keep in mind this isn't likely some sinister plot. A duopoly requires little coordination, or even effort. One simply follows laziness and greed in that order. (putting too much ambition into "greed' will either draw the ire of your bigger companion in the duopoly, or risk waking up the regulators from their torpor.)
Now that is funny, but also a damn lie.
Better than Bing etal, but still crap if you want to filter out words, etc, or tell it to ignore specific sites as they seem to appear at the top of the list for no good reason at all (reddit, quora)
Google also has a habit of giving you the opposite of a search query. If that is a more common request.
So How do I remove {item}? will give you, as well as the vast swathe of results telling where you can buy the bloody thing, a long set of (you Tube mostly) explanations of how to install one.But not how to get rid of the one you have.
The very fact that there are such discrepancies between the results of different 'search engines' demonstrates that they're not primarily searching for relevance to your request, they're filtering for commercial advantage. Yet again, the purpose is not to serve the user, it's to rake in dosh.
I remember with much sadness the Infoseeek engine in the early '90s. It accepted Boolean search strings and delivered anything that contained matching content. In those day you could actually refine your search progressively by adding qualifying terms. Today, the more terms you add to your search the greater the proportion of irrelevant twaddle the engine delivers to you. And no specific engine stands out as significantly better or worse -- they're all primarily commercial promo vehicles.
Google has removed, obsfucated or just ignores most of the basic functions you used to be able to use to get better results.
Clearly it's not to improve search for the end user but to prevent any avoidance of its list of paid for links.
But then the old rule applies, "if the service is free, you are the product". I'm not sure there even is a way to pay for search now to avoid this.
Except, you are the customer.
Or more accurately, you are their customers' customer. And if I no longer trust Google to give me the right search results, it means I no longer respond to their ads, which means their customers don't get my money, which means that Google doesn't get their money.
I've tried using Google to search for things I want to buy recently, and the results were so useless that I had to go elsewhere to find it.
"I'm not sure there even is a way to pay for search now to avoid this."
In practical terms no. The software, processing, storage, and infrastructure to create an effective search engine able to serve the general public is beyond the reach of any but the richest pockets, and when you look at DDG it appears to be a search aggregation engine rather than a true search engine.
Privacy-focused email outfit Proton crunched the numbers earlier this month and concluded that for Google, the average search user was worth about $47 a year worldwide, with big regional variations for obvious reasons. In the US it could be as high as $390, with some clear caveats so probably a fair bit lower, I'd guess a figure around $270? If we assume that the UK is worth 20% less perhaps $215, then that's £14.20 every month for search services. How many people would pay that, and does that sum multiplied by the number of paying users give a result that would support the necessary scale?
The evidence is pretty clear - most people expect the internet to be free, and those who differ (and will pay) are too small a group to be worth serving on a paying basis. All of which means Google have won, the best you can do if you don't like that is ad-blockers and locked down browsers, and they only go so far.
Most of the huge expense is in terms of trying to scour literally the entire public internet, then digest both the content and traffic to correlate activity, create profiles of web surfers, then build the paid placement, ad auction, and other spyware and profiteering infrastructure.
A search engine that limited it's scope to content in the language the searcher could read, paired with a more ruthless site reputation system, would reduce the cost of crawling and summarizing content to a manageable level for many interest domains. Indexes like this already exist, and most support the kind of advanced search features that USED to be part of Google. It's not hard to implement a paid search layer on top of something like this to offset computationally expensive searches. And a free tier could probably be funded by charging a modest fee to sites that wanted to participate in the listings, a fee that would likely be a fraction of what most sites are spending on SEO in it's various forms, or worse, in adwords spend on OTHER sites hoping to lure traffic and eyes that the operators hope will also be monetized by selling more ad impressions back to Google.
None of that will ever unseat Google, regulators would have to do that. But I frankly just need functional search, Google be damned.
So "Annie Lennox first band" on Google says "the Tourists" unequivocally.
However "Annie Lennox first band" on Bing says: "Annie Lennox's first band was The Catch, which later evolved into The Tourists. She met Dave Stewart in 1975 and they first played together in 1976 in The Catch. After releasing one single as The Catch in 1977, the band evolved into The Tourists, where Lennox was the lead singer from 1977 to 1980."
Is this correct? It's apparently from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I'd trust. If so, I'd rate Bing a bit closer to the mark. but that's today's results, not the results from "back when" and I think Bing still sucks as a search engine.
So the trial is because Google "flouted competition laws to build its dominance of the US search market"
I think that's bullshit. I have no argument that Google is top dog in the US search market, and they did it simply by building a better search engine than Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, and everybody else.
My beef with Google is that they've let that technical achievement rot in favor of manipulating the results as they see fit, and as they're paid. They've removed features such as boolean search, search operators, and they even had a feature for a while of "don't return results from this site" which is also gone. They have indeed abused their position as top search engine.
If what you're saying is accurate, "The Catch" is and are "The Tourists", so "The Tourists" is a correct answer. Same members? Same legal identity, if any?
However, if the original story is correctly stating that Bing and its user both treated (annie lennox first band) as a question, I object. It isn't a question.
I don't know, but it's conceivable that the first band that Annie Lennox enjoyed listening to is Glen Miller.
There even may be more than one person named Annie Lennox, but probably not more than one allowed performing in commercial music. Another Annie Lennox may write about personal taste in music, however.
Regardless, if Bing presented as its own statement of fact "The first and/or only band that Annie Lennox was a member of is The Eurhythmics", that is inaccurate and unfortunate.
If they presented a link to a separate popular web site and a line from it making that assertion, that is inaccurate and unfortunate but not Bing's fault.
However, if Bing has a habit of offering inaccurate information from Web sites, more so than Google, that probably is a deficiency. Any Web search engine almost certainly should offer results in a reasonable order, and not alphabetical which just isn't very useful in this context. I'm somewhat uneasy about letting Google or Bing or internet users as a whole make decisions about "What is truth?" And so I do prefer to be offered a variety of results from one search query, and for them to be contradictory. Then I can make a decision about which claims I prefer.
" they did it simply by building a better search engine than Bing, Yahoo, Altavista, and everybody else."
Microsoft said the same things about Windows. Then the court cases showed the restrictive contracts, product tie-ins, and other anti-competitive actions.
I think it's bullshit to imagine that a monopoly doesn't engage in monopolistic behaviours. To not do so would be to not "maximise shareholder value".
The results you pull now are not the results that were pulled at the time.
Big surprise if it came up in a high profile meeting, that the returned info was "improved". We had an overblocking issue with Apples content filter, and while it took a while to get sorted out, it now seems the female artist in question was added to a permanent "Safe list" on Apples side. I suspect that someone like Ballmer had a meltdown after that Apple meeting and probably made their displeasure known to the search team.
As to your beef with Google's search being enshitified, I agree. The bastards don't even really respect restricting the search results to a specific site. Then there are crap holes like Pinterest that SEO bomb the results on image search and hide the source links, while hosting the same material from dozens of domains to prevent users excluding their results.
-pinterest = almost all Pinterest results
So much junk served up when you are looking for something.
I put lots of terms to my own web site and it is something like page 10 on google.
May as well use DDG, as not raelly any worse.
I don't go to the German tin plate toy train search engine much, as I do 4mm scale British.
With practice - and on a PC browser - you can swipe past the "Sponsored" results. But sometimes there are a lot. They maybe have to be there to pay for the thing. We assume that users who are less aware than we are, are deceived by these. Indeed, if they weren't, then who would pay Google for being listed in sponsored results? But by sweeping them away, you are devaluing the sponsorship model. By now I don't know if I think that is good or bad.
Or I suppose you could click on the links to Amazon and ... whatever there is besides Amazon, but then you do not buy anything. Hah! But their competitors probably already do that.
A separate problem is non-sponsored results - at least they appear to be not sponsored - which nevertheless occupy pages of search with apparent commercial product that you do not want to know about, but that is using the words of the thing that you want to know about,
We need innovation in the search sector. We could have distributed, persistent and crowd-sourced search facilities, but we don't even have basic contextualisation options. We get a couple of screens of results, mostly commercial and pop culture junk, much of which ignores half of our search terms. It's pathetic.
You don't actually have to throw a lot of cash at making a better search engine (or a better, distributed social media network). It's not hugely expensive, like installing anti-terrorist bollards in York (£3.5m). Seriously, why? Have you ever met a terrorist with a burning desire to target York? Doing innovative tech is actually quite cheap, and doesn't need to involve all the fake AI BS that we see every day now.
I guess GAFA is just lawyer-led now, and nobody there really gives a toss any more.
Oh, and I still have my 7" single of 'I Only Want To Be With You' by The Tourists.
"You don't actually have to throw a lot of cash at making a better search engine (or a better, distributed social media network). It's not hugely expensive, "
Perhaps not. But writing a search algo is only part of creating a search engine, and I'm pleased you've stepped up to the plate for the whole kaboodle. As a start on your Sisyphean labours, you can estimate what the total amount of indexable data is this year or last year. That's going to be huger than a hugish huge thing. Then you can calculate the processing power you'll need to index the current catalogue (and where you'll find that grunt), how much you'll pay to do that, and how much storage and processing you'll need to hold the index. Then you can work out what the rate of increase in indexable data is, how much processing and additional storage you'll need every day. After that you need to think about search query processing, load management and response times - that'll be a pricey penny as you'll be duplicating your index many times and dealing with billions of searches in near real time.....And then you need to come up with some ideas for how you'll pay for this.
So maybe it is in fact mind numbingly expensive to come up with a clean sheet search engine as good as Google is now? The original Google that usurped Alta Vista, Lycos and the rest might have been cheap, but that would cut no mustard now. Mind you, talking of cheap, Page & Brin reportedly would have sold the early Google for $750k, but a chap called George Bell of competing search business Excite said nope. Imagine being him in the intervening 20 odd years.
I agree Google is crap now. Still much much much less crap than Bing, but it's still crap. Top results are all paywall sites like medium.com, and if I see "is <searchterm> worth it?" much more I might just explode. Such generic use of the term "Worth it" just bugs the crap out of me.
Bring back altavista.digital.com
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