Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I like to imagine someday Microsoft is going to come out and say the results which they said Google won Bing won and vice versa. This is the only thing that makes sense given Microsoft's marketing speak on that site (suggesting Bing wins in the majority of cases) as I've never known someone to actually have Bing come out on top.


When I came up with my own search terms, Google won, 4 to 1. When I selected from the set they gave me (the list below the box to type in a manual query), Bing honestly won every single round. That's actually how they ran the experiment: they gave each person a set of search terms chosen from the Google Zeitgeist to select from. If you are curious to learn more about the experiment, Microsoft has a not-terribly-in-depth article covering the setup (there may be something more in-depth somewhere, but this is what Bing forwarded me to and it at least seems to directly answer your question).

http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2013/0...

Frankly, though, the reason that I believe Bing kept winning for me is that for these really popular core queries, the results were very similar: Bing simply selected more useful text snippets from news articles (letting me avoid clicking results) and weirdly even had better page titles, so it made what was overall the same results more pleasant to use. When I selected my own queries, though, the fact that Google continues to (and will forever) have a larger selection of the Internet available to its search engine became the deciding factor, as it would surface a few interesting things that Bing wouldn't catch.

What I thereby obtain from Bing it On! is not that I want to switch from Google, but that Google has too much power at this point: they are probably forever going to get my search queries simply because they figured out how to index the web extensively and efficiently before "how to build scalable systems" became more general knowledge (although some of that is actually due to Google, so there's this part of me that is saying "shut up and be grateful"), but now that they have this lead there's no real way to kick them down, even if someone else has managed to use the data they have more effectively.


Ah, thanks for the insight and the link.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: