I moved to Ixquick and liked what I saw in the beginning. It too had the same issues that Bing had unfortunately. Complex search queries usually yielded results pages that would not help me in my research.

I switched to Duck Duck Go about two weeks ago and have not looked back since. Let me start the review by saying that I still have to switch to Google or Bing sometimes to get the results that I want. But that’s true for every search engine. There have been searches where Google could not provide me with results that I was looking for.

What I really like about Duck Duck Go is its simplicity. It is what Google has been a long time ago, a search engine that concentrates on search, and not on shoving advertisement and Google service promotions down the user’s throat.

The search results – often – begin with information at the top that are taken from Wikipedia. It is a quick one-liner that provides you with basic information about the site, service or name. The box links to Wikipedia and the official site, as well as related categories on the Duck Duck Go search engine. You can disable that box in the search settings.

Below the box is either the official site, outlined with a special button for better visibility, or a sponsored link result. This sponsored link is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the results.

Search suggestions on the right can help you redefine the search. For Ghacks, you find suggestions such as software, windows or Google listed there that can be appended to the search phrase with a click.

Search results are not personalized, and users are not tracked when using the search engine.

The search engine offers access to so called !bangs that you can use to redirect your search directly to a supported site.

You can for instance enter !youtube phrase to be redirected to YouTube’s search results page for the phrase you have entered. Hundreds of bangs exist, from searching popular blogs like Arstechnica or Lifehacker over Chrome, Firefox and Opera add-ons and userscripts to software downloads or company websites.

You can furthermore use \ in front of your search term to be taken directly to the first search result.

Interested users can check out the goodies page which highlights some of the advanced capabilities of the search engine. This includes conversions and calculations that you can make directly in the search engine, dates that you can look up and other interesting stuff.
There is also a list of keyboard shortcuts, that include navigating back and forth with j and k, t to go to the top or m to highlight the first result (which you could then open with a tap on the enter key).

Switch To DuckDuckGo in your browser

Google Chrome users need to click on the wrench icon in the upper right corner, and select Settings from the menu that opens.

They then need to locate Search on the first page and click on the Manage search engines button. Locate DuckDuckGo in the list, hover over its entry and click on the Make default button that appears.

Firefox users need to enter about:config into their browser’s address bar. They then need to filter for the term keyword.URL, double click the parameter on the results page and replace the value with http://duckduckgo.com/?q=.

Microsoft Internet Explorer users can head over to the Internet Explorer Gallery to install the Duck Duck go search provider plugin which adds the search engine to Microsoft’s browser.

What’s Missing?

Duck Duck Go does not maintain its own image search engine. If you want to search for images, you can either use a !bang to start the search on Duck Duck Go, or open an image search engine to search there directly.

The search engine does not link to cached versions of a page listed in the results. It is sometimes the only way to access information posted on the site, for instance if it is temporarily or permanently down.

Some searches still require you to switch search engines to find suitable results. My personal experience was that I had to switch engines less often than when I used Bing or Ixquick.

Verdict

I have not looked back yet after switching to Duck Duck Go. It is definitely an improvement over Bing or Ixquick. And while it may not be on pair with Google, it is close enough to justify the switch. I can still switch to Google or Bing if I cannot find a solution or answer in the search engine, which is even easier when using !bangs.

I’d encourage you to try the search engine for a week or so, to see if it meets your expectations. If not, you can still go back to Google or Bing. If it does, congratulations and welcome to the family.

While that’s distracting from the search form, it also is something that is highly popular.

Bing today announced an addition to their search engine’s homepage. Users with HTML5 capable browsers may see a video playing instead of the static wallpaper image.

The developers note that this is not something that Bing users should expect to see every day, but that it will be used regularly in the future. Most modern web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera) should display the video just fine.

It has to be noted that only the US homepage of the search engine is currently showing the HTML5 video on the frontpage. Users from other countries that head over to Bing need to change the country to United States first in the upper right corner to see the HTML5 video in action.

Bing announced that the videos will be rolled out to international markets in the coming months, so that users from all over the world can view the videos on localized versions of the search engine.

I personally have to admit that it looks really well on the homepage, and that loading times do not seem to be longer than before. I was not able to test the connection on a slower machine. It can be that users connecting with low speed Internet connection may have a different experience.

Microsoft has created a video that gives us a look behind the scenes of the Bing homepage.

Have you seen the new HTMl5 video on the Bing homepage? If so, what’s your take on it?

Today Bing announced that they have added a second authoritative feature called Action Buttons. Action button basically suggest common actions performed on the site. The Bing community blog has two examples for that.

First the results page for United Airlines which lists the United Airlines homepage as an authority site. The action buttons for the United Airlines result case are Check in, Flight status and Book a flight. These buttons are displayed on the right of the search result.

The second example is for a car rental company and the action buttons Rent a car, Locations and Contact us relate to that.

The first thing that I noticed was that some of the site links led to the same pages on the site. This resulted in a few follow up questions that I had. For instance, why is it necessary to display actions twice in the results. And as a consequence, if it is not time to revamp the sitelinks part of the algorithm on Bing to make sure that sitelinks and actions are not identical.

There are arguments for the way Microsoft is laying out those information on the page. The action buttons are larger than the sitelinks, which makes them more prominent on the results page. Search engine users on the other hand are used to sitelinks, and some might feel left alone when those links suddenly display different kinds of pages for sites that they visit regularly (do not get me started on why they do not access the sites directly. Many use search engines for everything, even if they visit a site daily).

You will notice some irregularities when it comes to the new feature. Banks for instance return only a log in action button and nothing else. Viable options here would be to link to the bank’s contact and support pages.

Regardless of that I think that it is an interesting idea that works very well for some industries, and not so well for others. What’s your take on Action Buttons.

Bing up until now did not make use of some of those techniques. The company did however announce a new concept called adaptive search yesterday. Adaptive Search basically uses previous searches to determine the best results for a user on Bing. These results are then displayed more prominently on the search engine (they get bonus points so to speak).

The concept is all about ambiguity. Search engines sometimes do not know what you are looking for. Say you enter cars in the search form. You could be looking for automotive information, or the movie cars, or someone with the last name Cars.

Adaptive search looks at a user’s previous searches to determine which results the user is after. Someone who searched for Disney and Cars 2 before may see more information about the movie Cars than about automobiles. The same is true for a user who searched for car brands like Mercedes before, only that this user would see more automotive related results.

Here is a video that demonstrates the concept.

Some users may have privacy concerns. Microsoft notes that the feature can be disabled by turning off the search history on Bing.

Adaptive search has its shortcomings. Lets take the Australia example from the Bing news page. Say you research your next vacation in Australia. You perform a few searches and get all things sorted out. Just before the start of your vacation, you decided to look up the movie Australia to watch it before the trip. If you just enter Australia, you might end up with no movie information whatsoever. You can counter this by searching for Australia movie obviously.

What’s your take on Adaptive Search?

I suspected that Bing’s quality was not really better as that of Google, but I wanted to make a point, and thought it would be interesting to see how I would do with Bing as my main search engine.

When I say Bing I think of an English search engine. Yes, Bing has localized sites but the results there are not good at all. That, and Microsoft’s obvious concentration on the US market forced me to switch to localized Google search engines for many non-English queries.

Bings English results are not as bad as many Internet users might think they are. Plus, it has some features that Google does not have. What I really like is that the official site is highlighted on Bing search results.

The association that the first entry on the search results page is always the official site is not always correct, and this may help users distinguish between official sites and unofficial ones. It is on the other hand brand related, Ghacks for instance has no official site listing on Bing.

I also like that there is generally less advertisement and Microsoft properties on search results pages. Yes, there are some queries where you see ads all over the place plus links to other Microsoft properties, but most pages are cleaner than Google’s.

The quality of the results depends highly on your searches. I’d generally say that Bing displays less splogs (Spam Blogs) and exact keyword domains with thin content in the results. This may be because most sites like those tend to concentrate on Google when it comes to SEO.

For some searches, I had to switch to Google after searching on Bing for a while. This can be mainly attributed to Google’s time filter which Bing only displays on some results pages and not all.

I personally like the time filter a lot, especially on searches where “old pages” are shown on the first search results page. This happens for Windows troubleshooting searches a lot. You search for something and see that only Windows XP or Windows 2000 results are shown, even though you are looking for Windows 7 results. Adding Windows 7, or other descriptive terms helps sometimes but not always. A limit to display only search results of the past year does wonders to the results though. This has helped me more than once, and I consider it essential.

The biggest factor that is holding Bing back in my opinion is the concentration on the US market. Sure, it is Microsoft’s home market, and concentration on a single market works for other search engines, Baidu anyone, very well. But Microsoft wants to compete with Google and not Baidu, which means that they have to improve the results on their localized search engines and the features on those search engines to compete with the almighty Google (Google has a market share of 90%+ in many European countries, which makes me wonder why the EU never stepped in here.)

I do about 80% of my searches on Bing nowadays, and the remaining 20% on Google. I usually switch to Google if the Bing results do not turn up the right results, or if I want to use a localized search engine. Bing’s results have improved over the course of the year.

Have you tried Bing?

Still, Facebook Search is not here yet, and it is not clear if it ever will. What seems to be clear is that search engines add social components to their search. Google and Bing utilize Twitter messages for instance and add them to the search results.

Microsoft recently made a change to its Bing search engine. You may remember that Bing announced a partnership with Facebook in October 2010 which added links to the Bing search results that a user’s Facebook friends liked.

Back then Bing added a “Liked by your Facebook friends” to the end of the search results page. The information were presented to the user in addition to the regular search results.

Bing has now made changes to the integration of Facebook likes. They basically did away with the Liked by your Facebook friends module at the end and integrated likes directly in the search results listings.

Your Facebook friend’s likes may appear right beneath individual search results on the Bing search results page.

The example screenshot above shows how it looks like in Bing Search. Not every search query will trigger Like results. It depends largely on the number of friends and their likes. Some users may never see likes in the results, while others may see them constantly.

The usefulness of the information depends largely on the friends of the searcher. It always boils down to this: Do you trust your friend’s likes?

A simple example. If you search for the “which movie should I see in cinema today”, you may see results that contain likes of some of your friends. Say you are male and the likes are all from female friends. While it is possible that this movie may be fun to watch, another movie may be a better choice.

The integration of Facebook information in Bing should be seen as one additional signal that may aid user’s in the decision making process.

What’s your take on the integration of Facebook in Bing Search? (via)

According to Danny Sullivan’s article Google setup a honeypot to lure Bing into the trap. Google manipulated their search engine to rank honeypot pages for 100 words that neither Bing nor Google have found matches before. In the second step 20 Google engineers began to run test queries from their home computers running Internet Explorer with Suggested sites and the Bing toolbar enabled. The engineers were also asked to click on the first search result on Google that would come up.

Some of the results started to appear in Bing 14 days after the experiment had started. Interestingly enough, only 9 out of the 100 searches produced the same result on Bing and Google.

As a result, Google assumed that Bing was copying Google Search results.

Harry Shum, Corporate VP at Bing, today replied at the Future of Search event:

We use over 1,000 different signals and features in our ranking algorithm. A small piece of that is clickstream data we get from some of our customers, who opt-in to sharing anonymous data as they navigate the web in order to help us improve the experience for all users.
To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience.

It is a fact that Bing uses data from its toolbar to improve their search results.

The question is: Did Bing copy Google’s search results, or did they merely use the anonymous usage data from those 20 Google engineers (which included a search term and an url they clicked on) to improve Bing’s search results for that query?

There are to many open questions that the claims are not justified, for instance: Why have only 9% of the search results been identical and not a higher number or even all of them.

The honeypot alone is no proof that Bing is indeed copying search results from Google. The explanation that Microsoft is making use of user queries and actions seems more reasonable.

What’s your take on this? Let me know in the comments.

Locate Multiple Domains in Search Results is a free userscript that can visualize results from those domains in the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.

The script unfortunately requires manual editing of its code to add domains to it but more about that later.

The userscript basically allows the configuration of an unlimited number of sites that should be highlighted in the three popular search engines. Each site can get its own color code for additional means of visualizing them. It is of course also possible to use one color for all sites, or use colors for specific site groups.

The userscript needs to be edited before it becomes useful. This is done differently depending on the browser and its version. One option is to save the userscript to the local computer, instead of installing it right away, to edit it there which is more comfortable than editing it in the browser window.

Users who want to do that find the source code on this page. Simply copy and paste it into a plain text file on your computer first as it is easier that way for editing purpose.

Locate the following code near the top of the source code

var sites = [
['devseo.co.uk', '#C2D9EF'],
['syst3m32.co.uk', '#98292B'],
['myspace.com', '#CCC']
];

each site is added in the format ['domain name', 'color'],

To add new domain names edit the existing ones or add new ones. Make sure you keep the format exactly as it is, as it would break the script otherwise. To add ghacks as the first site you would change the code this way

var sites = [
['ghacks.net', '#C2D9EF'],
['syst3m32.co.uk', '#98292B'],
['myspace.com', '#CCC']
];

You can check out a HTML color code chart here if you need to. Simply add all your favorite sites this way and save the file in the end as userscript.js.

Then drag and drop it into the browser window where it should be automatically picked up. Firefox users need the Greasemonkey extension for this though. (via Make use of)

The feature which is going to be rolled out in the United States in the coming weeks will show friends’ recommendations on Bing. If you search for top movies you see which friends liked the movies shown in the results.

Today, we’re partnering with Bing to give you a way to bring your friends’ recommendations to online search. Your friends have liked lots of things all over the web, and now instead of stumbling across a new movie or having to look at a friend’s profile to see which restaurants they like, we’re bringing everything together in one place.

When you search for something on Bing or in web results on Facebook (powered by Bing), you’ll be able to see your friends’ faces next to web pages they’ve liked. So, you can lean on friends to figure out the best websites for your search.

Now, I’m not sure if this new “liked by your Facebook friends” integration in Bing is showing up for all kinds of searches, as it could be quite awkward to find out that some of your friend’s like specific adult movies for instance, or weirder things..

It is not clear if the feature will be rolled out to all users, but only available on the Bing US search engine, or only to US users on Bing. Another thing that needs consideration is that it is likely that Facebook users need to be logged in on Facebook to see the recommendations.

Most commenters at the official blog announcement post seem to like the feature, but would have preferred to see a mashup with Google instead of Bing.

What’s your take on the new feature? Is it improving search quality on Bing, or yet another feature that does not really improve it.

My personal concerns are that you may need to be logged in on Facebook to use the feature. Oh yeah, that, and I generally do not listen to my friend’s recommendations anyway, haha. Will there be an option to turn it off? Lets hope so.

The Bing team announced yesterday that the layout and design of Bing search has been changed for all users. The most obvious change is a placement change of the Quick Tabs bar. Quick Tabs are links to query relevant search results, e.g. Images, News and Videos, a search filter so to speak.

The Quick Tabs bar has been moved to the top of Bing pages just below the search form and above the search results.

bing new design

Selecting a tab in the results changes not only the search results that are displayed but also the related information in the sidebar. A search for Firefox will display the standard Bing search results for the browser. A switch to the Wikipedia tab displays the Wikipedia entry about Firefox right on the Bing page.

bing search

The Bing developers have also made specific changes to certain types of searches, specifically when searching for entertainment, autos and finance related topics.

Searching for specific songs in Bing displays a Lyrics Quick Tab which, when clicked on, displays the lyrics of the song in the Bing interface.

bing lyrics

Bing has integrated additional information about artists including photos, videos and tour dates that are easily accessible from the Quick Tabs bar. US users will also have access to the five million songs of the Zune library with 30 seconds previews of every song available.

bing songs

Games have been integrated into Bing as well. About 100 different games can be played directly in the search engine, a search for Bejeweled and other popular games yields a Play Now button to play the game directly in Bing.

bing games

Similar additions have been made to TV show and movie searches providing search engine visitors with additional information right in the results.

Auto specific searches now display a specs quick tab that lists vehicle specific information directly in the search engine.

bing auto

Finance searches lastly have been extended by a lot. A click on the Finance quick tab link when searching for finance related information displays heaps of direct information.

bing finance

The Bing search engine is evolving just like Google Search, Yahoo or Ask. The changes should be helpful for a lot of searchers. Some webmasters on the other hand might dislike that trend as it reduces their exposure in those sectors tremendously. Who for example needs a lyrics website if the search engine displays all the lyrics directly?

Bing Videos for one got a new interface making use of a sidebar navigation for a better and faster browsing experience. Other improvements to the interface include the option to dim the surroundings when a video is played to be able to better focus on the video. New content providers have been and will be added to Bing Videos making the service a very comprehensive source for videos and tv shows from all over the web.

Most of the US tv shows can only by viewed by US users on the other hand which puts a dent to the service for users from outside the US. Read the announcement here for additional information.

Today was also the beginning of the next chapter of Bing Search with improvements to travel, weather and shopping options. One of the interesting options is a search for events in US cities. The search term city events will lead to a standard Bing search results page with the difference that the first result will list events in that city and link to a bigger event listing in case that short listing is not enough.

Other additions include “better results for health conditions, medications, and even hospitals”, search sharing with friends at Facebook and Twitter or better help to plan and book travel. Most of these additions seem to be targeted at US visitors at the moment with the likelihood that they will eventually become available for visitors from other countries as well.

The Bing search connector can be downloaded at Bing’s community portal. It comes as a osdx file that needs to be executed after download. Windows 7 will automatically install the Bing search connector which becomes then available in Windows Explorer.

The search provider is usually listed under the Favorites menu in the left sidebar. A search is performed by typing in the search phrase into the Windows Explorer search form in the right header of the window.

Search results are then displayed in the Windows Explorer window from where they can be opened and accessed. Additional federated search connectors for various online services are available at Redmond Pie.

A click on any topic will open the results in an image grid. The results are automatically sorted. The cell phone results page for instance sorts the different cell phones by brand. Hovering over a cell phone will display a search term in the Bing search box; A click will perform a normal search in Bing for the search term.

Various sorting options are provided in a drop down menu at the top. Cell phones can for example be sorted by Bing popularity or contract price while the movies in theater can be sorted by release date, title, metacritic rating or weekend box office earnings.

The search engine will automatically sort the results without reloading the page. Bing’s visual search can be a comfortable way of exploring specific information. It is handy for Internet users who want to research specific topics like movies that are currently playing in cinema, popular books, top iPhone apps and dog breeds. This is especially a good solution for users who do not know where to look for this information. Internet veterans usually know the websites that they have to open to find the information that they are looking for.

Bing Visual Search (link) is an interesting concept but it is currently limited to a few dozen popular topics, probably to ensure that the quality of the results remains high. It is probably not going to be introduced on a larger scale in the near future.

Update:

Bing Visual Search is only available to visitors who are using the United States version of the search engine (maybe some others but that has not been tested). If another country is shown in the top right corner then a page not found error is displayed. To access visual search users need to change the country to United States.

It basically centers on the following idea: The quality of search engine results can be improved by adding a human factor into the equation. Page Hunt will display websites to its visitors who have to guess the search phrase that is used to find that specific page in Bing. Points are awarded if the website is in the top 5 of the search engine for that query.

The researchers on the other hand are able to learn from the data that the users enter. They can use both positive and negative hits to improve the quality of Bing search results. Websites that are displayed to users range from commercial websites to those that promote open source software like Open Office. It is however sometimes quite difficulty to find the right search term to get the points.

Head over to Page Hunt if you want to play a little game and help Microsoft improve the quality of the Bing search results. Page Hunt requires Microsoft Silverlight.

1. Remove the Bing background image

Many users think that the background image that is shown on the Bing homepage is more of a distraction than anything else. There is however a very easy way of removing the background image in the search engine to work with a barebone version without the background image. All that needs to be done is to open the Bing homepage with the following parameter:

http://www.bing.com/?rb=0

This will make the homepage show up without the background image which gets rid of the noise and can save some Kilobytes of data transfer as well.

2. IP Address lookup

Bing can lookup any IP address using an advanced parameter and display a list of domains that are hosted on that IP address. The parameter to do that is the following:

IP:[IP Address]

Substitute [IP Address] with a valid IP. The query IP:207.46.104.147 would for example display a list of domains hosted on that IP address.

3. Every search is available as an RSS feed

Every search on Bing is also available as an RSS feed which can be very interesting for webmasters who want to monitor their position in the search engine. The web feed will be updated whenever changes in website rankings occur. The feeds can be accessed from the web browser’s toolbars or by pointing a feed reader to the result url and appending

&format=rss

To the results. A search for Windows 7 would be available as an RSS feed from the following url

http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+7&go=&qb=1&format=rss

4. The contains parameter

The parameter contains will tell the search engine to only look for websites that contain that search term. This can lead to some interesting searches when combined with other search phrases, some examples are:

Windows 7 contains:torrent
Madonna contains:mp3
Google contains:pdf

5. Display only wallpaper images

Bing’s image search has already received some praise in the past days. One interesting feature is the ability to display only wallpaper images in the image search results. This is done by searching for a term in Bing image search and clicking on the Size category in the left sidebar. It will automatically display various size filters including one called wallpaper. This will display only images that have the exact size of the computer screen resolution.

The parameters are available in the url which means users can change it to find wallpapers for other screen resolutions as well.

Bing Experiment Rules:

• Use Bing exclusively for all of your searches for the next seven days
• Write down what went well and what did not
• Let us know your overall experience and rating of the search engine after the week
• You may perform the exact same search in another search engine to compare results
• You may also perform the exact same search in another search engine if Bing does not provide the results that you expect
• You may use other search engines to look at search engine rankings

Now that we have established the rules of the experiment we would like to offer participants an incentive to take part. We are going to give away five Ghacks t-shirts to five random participants providing that we get that many users participating.

We would like to hear about your thoughts and experience with Bing. If you have anything to say let us hear about it. Check out Install Bing Search In Selected Web Browsers and our initial short review of Microsoft Bing.

Microsoft surely has the work power and knowledge to create a search engine that could even the field. Bing however seems to be different from what people expected when they first heard about the new search engine. A short presentation video that has been published today gives a glimpse of the interface and functionality of the search engine.

The video concentrates on business, shopping, travel and health all very profitable niches but reveals little information about the aspects of the search engine that interest most users. The quality of the results can only be measured in tests once the search engine is accessible. The integrated features look interesting but might only appeal to a minority of users online.

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.

And features like cashback, where we actually give you money back on great products, and Price Predictor, which actually tells you when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price — help you make smarter decisions, and put money back in your pocket.

The Bing search engine is said to go live in the coming days.