Microsoft has reached $1M giveaway levels of desperation to attract users to Bing We're not saying Microsoft is desperate for people to use Bing, but a $1 million sweepstakes that grants entries to users of the search engine sure quacks like a duck. The contest, which kicked off last month, is open to anyone with a Microsoft account (who resides in the US, Canada, UK, France, or Germany) and a willingness …
I've always found Bing best for specialty pornography. Whereas Google Search makes it impossible to identify the actresses without clicking through, Bing has an oh-so-helpful button that unblurs everything in two clicks. Also, having to append every Google search with "-ai" is getting to be a pain.
the phrase “specialty pornography”. The mind boggles!
Too true! It's not as though this domain has the range of interfaces that audio plugs or pre USB phones boasted.
If it were really "specialty" I don't think donkeys have names or that nuns would want theirs bruited about. ;)
FetLife would be a good place to start - it even has a Kinktionary to help explain it, though it might boggle your mind even more, depending on your proclivities/experience! At least there’s no AI and the adverts are very unobtrusive (though these will take you to interesting shops...). It’s actually a very effective social network with millions of members, not a normal porn site.
Speaking as an active member of the community - I’ll grab my mac on the way out (had to get a computer angle in somewhere)...
Hi, you've won the Bing sweepstake, ONE MILLION DOLLARS! Congratulations, I just need your bank details to pay your winnings. erm... yeah, I need your online bank username and password for security reasons too... thank you and can you confirm by telling me the 2FA code sent to your phone... Great, thanks very much, have a nice day.
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And avoiding Google's propensity for poisoning the first page of search results with ads that are tenuously related¹ to the search term.
I hardly ever get those. Perhaps it's the way you/I tend to search. I do occasionally get links to things I can buy but not often.
A Google search for 'golf shoes' returns results that take me to various shopping sites and that's fine. 'spikeless or spiked golf shoes' gives me a reasonable selection of links giving the pros/cons of each. 'image of golf shoes' gives me images (some stock, some links to shops) but here it all goes wrong. If I click on the image I want to go straight to the web page. Instead I get a poxy little popup on the right hand side of my screen and I have to click on a button marked Visit or on the URL. Curiously 'golf shoes image' gives results with far fewer images.
Then again I have an ad-blocker installed so perhaps I'm just not seeing what you are full stop. And I have a plug-in installed that hides the AI response.
"A Google search for 'golf shoes' returns results that take me to various shopping sites and that's fine."
They've automatically helped you by adding "where do I buy" to whatever search term(s) you type.
None of the search engines seem to parse entries that well. I was looking for tips on how to make a cover for my evaporative cooler. What I wound up with had nothing to do with sewing a cover for my cooler no matter how I phrased my desire. Perhaps there IS nothing available, but what I was shown was utterly useless and still had to be looked through, just in case.
Not even a runner-up in the search engine market. Second only because all the others are practically non-existant.
Goes to show that the search engine market requires billions in datacenters and software. If Borkzilla can't make it work, who can ?
It felt bloated. The best thing Bing could do is stop reinventing the wheel and copy the Google's UI. Brave feels better, because it is similar. People don't like to change habits.
The MSN-style bloat appears in many places: even already too sluggish Skype with its News section. WTF? Are you trying to be Yahoo? I would rather customize the horrible Skype ringtone. Or fix the "person is online" indicator, when she is not.
Just focus on the main function, remove unrelated garbage, while making your apps snappy. MS Office UI has become sluggish too. I miss the days of WinAmp. No media player has ever bing better. Or look at modern online analytics platforms - they would render beautified graphs with a delay, just for the sake of the rendering effect. Nonsense. I want the graph immediately! The same with OS UI effects - waste of precious time. Life is too short.
It looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck duck go...
(DDG works for me, mostly. Interesting that the company machine now blocks other google services, for example translation, but still allows most google search returns through).
DDG ... Interesting that the company machine now blocks other google services, for example translation
I also noticed Google translate appears not to work under the Android DDG browser but pasting the source text into the lhs translate pane seems to kick it into action. I was blaming the chocolate factory for sabotaging this. Not that google translations are uniformly of a high standard or even roughly accurate.
Re Brave seems better...
All the search engines that are not Bing or Google use Bing or Google as their back end. I tested it out. Eg the AI generated crap you get on Brave is Bing's AI crap. There was even a "green" German search engine and it used Bing's arse end. HotBot still exists, though it doesn't do pix.
The only other search engine I found that didn't use the big boys sphincters was a useless POS from blighty.
I went back to Google even though I hate it.
You could win..... one meeeellion dollars!
We have tried leaving Edge as the only browser on new laptops and desktops, and people just ask “how do I get Chrome?”.
Bing is inextricably linked to Edge. Google search is on Chrome. People don’t know or care how to switch search engines. All they know is that Edge comes with that garish mix of sort-of-real-news, a bit of news, and clickbait bullshit as the default page. You can turn it off, but nobody knows (or cares) that all you need to do is go to one of the many top-right settings buttons and turn off something called “feed”.
That’s what everyone hates.
Google just has a home page with a search bar. Edge comes with time-wasting adverts and clickbait.
The average computer user knows when they’re veering steered in a particular direction, and they don’t like it. Microsoft needs to learn that if they give people what they want, without the flimflam, they might start liking their “products”.
"Google just has a home page with a search bar. Edge comes with time-wasting adverts and clickbait."
What makes Google money is analyzing the hell out of you, banking that data and selling it on in multiple ways. Ads on the home page aren't helping get you to tell them all about you and how to be selective in what to show you today in all that is best in tinned pig product. Doing anything else is cutting their own throat.
ChatGPT is absolutely useless, I'd always assumed when we did get "AI" (which this isn't, but that's for another thread) it would do more than parse a few results from my search and put "certainly!" at the start.
I do actually use Bing, for 2 reasons. One is Google has got worse and worse for actual results being hidden below ads, and the other is I use MS Rewards to get Game Pass free on my Xbox. Much of my searching is done for work anyway, looking up PowerShell command syntax and the like.
Since they starting ignoring negative or very specific prompts.
Photo of Bird -duck -stock will give birds, ducks and stock images
Keyword quote such a "duck" & "yellow" now means anything that is a duck or anything that is yellow.
And if it's Google, the first 10 will most likely anywhere I can buy a duck or something yellow
Search these days is a waste of time.
"Search these days is a waste of time."
Try "septic service" in "my city". I get plenty of results that are web sites programmed to claim that the company services my city but is either located too far away or is a referral site that will collect a fee from a company nearby to forward my information. What I rarely find is the web site of the local company on the first 10 pages.
In this case, I spotted the advertising on their truck and got a (clean) card from the person while I was out running errands. In the bronze age I would have had a yellow pages directory and found them in 3 minutes or less. Searching online is better, how exactly?
I use Bing when I'm looking for datasheets for weird ICs, like whatever it is that I have in bits in front of me.
Google is seriously shit here, and typically sends you to:
A, A datasheet site that says the required datasheet doesn't exist.
B, Some Chinese outfit that will sell you ten thousand of the things.
C, Some site where the quoted text looks appropriate but the moment you go to the site you're a half dozen redirects into some maze of AI generated spam advertising.
Oh, and Google will tell you it found a hundred and fifty thousand matches in a nanoparsec, but after page four or five it'll give up and say nothing else exists.
With Bing, I've found stuff that Google couldn't. That's not to say that Bing doesn't have it's own problems, but it isn't totally useless.
Oh, and the reverse image search is quite nice too, it actually often works, which is more than I can say about Google. Just a shame there doesn't appear to be a "pretend PInterest doesn't exist" option to stop that site clogging up the results on both searches.
Do enough searches on a particular topic and you'll know which are the sales sites and which .... aren't, or at least, less likely to be a sales site. Anything mac/iphone related normally brings up a "use our software instead" site rather than returning anything useful, for example.
So I'd like "let me save a string of convenient IGNORE THESE sites". No, i don't want to sign in, I'll save them to a text file on my desktop thank you very much. Copy and pasta when required.
Duck Duck isn't too? :)
Seems to be a tradition of using arbitrary unrelated names.
Archie probably wasn't even the first. Altavista was probably the sanest name of the lot. Jeeves makes sense if you were familar with PG Wodehouse's creation although arguably most search engines might be better named Bertie or Wooster.
Often it is faster to go to wikipedia for general queries and specialist sites for more technical stuff or look up a text.
Google is pretty much useless now. Its suggested completions on entering search terms, while often hilarious, are invariably ridiculous.
I was recently trying to find an answer to a question related to ike2 negotiated security associations between ipv6 peers and wasted hours futilely sifting through mountains of google crap and middans of duck shit.
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