Bing Search After A Year, The Good And Bad
You may know that I have switched by primary search engine from Google to Bing sometime last year. I was fed up with Google for several reasons, including their constant push of Google owned properties into the search engine results and the deteriorating quality of 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?
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Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.