Has Bing Already Overtaken Yahoo? 319
nk497 writes "Microsoft's newly revamped search tool Bing has already overtaken Yahoo in the US and globally, according to StatsCounter. The net traffic watcher said Bing has topped Yahoo 16.28% to 10.22% in the US, and 5.62% to 5.13% globally. Though the firm noted Bing's popularity may drop off after the excitement wears off, the firm also said: 'Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo at a cost of $40 billion it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.' Google, of course, still leads by a considerable margin."
StatCounter's Baidu Stats is Alarming (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They are not idiots, stop with the snobbery (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the real reason IT people get bad raps is because they are cranky from dealing with idiots all day. We don't call people idiots or morons because we think they are generally stupid. Idiot is easier to say than "inexperienced or complacent user". I refer to inexperienced or complacent users as idiots (or other equally derogatory word) when talking to other "IT people" (professionaly or not) all the time for simplicity (and probably as a vent for frustration).
I know full well they are not stupid (most of them), heck I've called some of the smartest people I know idiots or morons because they couldn't handle a computer to save their life. We use terms like that as a reference to their computer skill, not overall intelligence. If some other IT guy refers to someone as an idiot, I immediately know their skill level with using a computer is limited to being able to check Facebook, or less.
Maybe you should just lighten up and take less offense? It's not like we call people idiots to their faces. Unless they really deserve it.
Re:Prime Time Commercial (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Prime Time Commercial (Score:3, Interesting)
Yahoo might be worried, but I don't think Google cares... at this point it's a race for second place.
I wouldn't be so sure.
I tried Bing and it is quite good. It beats Google in many of my "usual" searches.
Re:It's the apps stupid! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yahoo is the market leader in webmail, and Hotmail is a close second. Those people still use Google for search.
Re:Redirects (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Prime Time Commercial (Score:3, Interesting)
I second this. If you check my posts, I don't think I ever written something positive about MS, but for the last few days I've been playing with Bing side by side with Google.
My findings so far:
- Bing's index is noticeably smaller than Google's; searching for very specific keywords simply do not show some results (I wasn't searching for porn)
- In 90% of the cases, Bing's results were similar to Google's, basically same results with small differences in ordering (#4 becomes #2, #3 is #6, etc.)
- The remaining 10% - sometimes Bing produces a very good result in the first 1-2 results, some other times it "thinks" you were looking for something else.
- Like Google, it favors results from Wikipedia.
Re:It's the apps stupid! (Score:3, Interesting)
Odd how I used to use google as the better search engine, but Yahoo! for maps, tv listings, movie listings, weather, etc.
They blew it.
When I gave mom a new computer, I really *wanted* to just give her a yahoo account instead of gmail. But they won't allow imap without paying them for it? wtf? Then there's what they did to the tv and movie listings, and the general fuckuppery of the entire site so they could be 'cool' with that 'web 2.0' stuff.
Yeah. They had a good thing, and an edge. And pissed it all away.
Forced (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course Bing has overtaken Yahoo. They just flipped the Live search over to Bing, and the media hype machine filled in the rest.
At work, where our security settings prevent changing the homepage or default search engine, any mistyped URL automatically rolls over to Bing now, without any prompting from our IT staff.
Re:Amused by their general marketing.. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not really (Score:4, Interesting)
My search queries typically consist of Google, and not-Google, just in-case Google isn't getting what I'm looking for. My not-Google used to be Yahoo, but when Cuil was new I tried it for a while, the results out of Bing are much more impressive than Cuil, it might permanently replace Yahoo as my not-Google search engine, but when not-Google isn't the new thing to try out, it only gets about 2-5% of my search traffic, as compared to 30-50% when trying something new.
Advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it may have been less "advertising" and more leveraging Windows Live Search redirections and newly-installed IE8 defaults.
Good for one day's bragging rights, I guess.
Time was, that would have resulted in a new monopoly. Guess you can't go back again.
Re:Uh, evidence? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's an internal manual for the evangelists (which is actually a job title at MS) not any evidence whatsoever in response to the GPs question.
Also, when discussing Microsoft, anything from Groklaw should be dismissed out of hand due to incredible bias. Groklaw makes Fox News look fair and balanced (and accurate for that matter)
Re:Redirects (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason I even knew bing existed was from reading slashdot. I'm a bit of a luddite so I don't catch onto the latest fads (e.g. I had texting is banned from my cell phone) but I think that it's right that the only people who know about bing are the ones who were looking for it, or are interested in computing in general. Therein lies the problem for MS. They could pour billions into advertising but I think most people tune out commercials nowadays, don't they?
I don't have cable, so I searched for the bing commerical on youtube. I watched it, it seemed like useless fluff that's not going to convince anyone to try anything because they never actually said what their search engine did differently from google, except that it was better (better at what? finding restaurants? searching for back pain? wtf?).
Re:Not really (Score:5, Interesting)
Not TFS. TFA. TFA is dated TODAY. Go click the link. It really doesn't hurt.
Re:Help (Score:3, Interesting)
No, it's not a hijack, it's a fuck up. Microsoft's search people seem to have forgotten about "auto.search.msn.com" (which is the URL hit when you type random garbage into the address bar) and forwarded that to Bing. Now with the old MSN Search, it'd catch that "&PROV=GOOG" on the end of the URL and establish that meant you wanted to use Google. Bing doesn't yet recognise "&PROV" (stands for Provider) query strings, which they intend to fix.
Also Interesting: (Score:3, Interesting)
-metric
Re:Not really (Score:2, Interesting)
You're either lying or doing it wrong. I did the same search in all three search engines and got information about the movie right away in all three. I'd guess doing it wrong, but if you want to admit you lied that's fine too...
Re:It's the apps stupid! (Score:5, Interesting)
Lexical processing is Google's Achilles heal. It's a royal pain when search results come back which silently discard odd-duck search terms. Try searching for "SAMe". Interesting, today for the first time, Google actually has a correct lexical match as the top result. The other day I had a search term where a punctuation mark was a critical disambiguator. That didn't work too good.
One that I beat my head against all the time is electronic component part numbers. The full, full, full part number using ends in six alphabetic digits which describes the production variant, right down to what the production engineer ate for breakfast that morning. It's kind of like net, net net, and net net net in real estate. (Interestingly, today Google returns pages titled "triple-net" for a search on "net net net". Another small improvement behind the scenes.) You'll often get the net net part name in distributor's catalogues, but if you want the data sheet, you often need to search on the just the root of the part, if you can guess which prefix stem that might be.
Of course, what you really want is to search on AT91SAM7* or AT91* depending on whether the programming technique in question applies to one part or the extended family.
And please, for the love of God, when I type in the part number which I know in advance is correct for the datasheet I'm seeking, return at least *one* authoritative hit in the top ten from the actual company that makes the part in question (by the billions, in some cases). Argh!!!! Argh!!!!!! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some vendors manage to place themselves in the top ten for their own parts, most don't. What's the problem? Is serving up your own data sheet too much like support and not enough like sales? Are these companies deliberately detuning their search results? The situation baffles me.
It's my daily sports fix hitting that little "vaporize into the cloud" button on top scoring results from alldatasheets.com which teases but doesn't deliver.
I suspect its not zero cost to extend Google to fully handle the long, long, long tail of variously truncated designator strings.
Another one: when I type "R" I mean the R language. Always. Get over it. If Google is going to gather my click trail, there's the one main thing they need to digest on my behalf. Thousands of queries over on r-seek and they still don't get it, usually discarding the term "R" entirely if it doesn't fit their prebuilt result for the companion search terms. +R doesn't work well either, as it forces Google to return every document index with an "R" subsection.
This is something that no software application has yet achieved. It's the baby Turing test. Identify three to ten personal-style hot buttons of the particular user, and then *don't do them*.
Instead, we've invented the world's shortest short bus: the software watches me replace with the original text the auto-correct garbage just inserted by Word (if I'm in for a bout of self-flagellation) or some other high-function IDE, and then auto-correct restores the thing I just manually deleted. Several times in a row, in a pique of futility. Isn't that the technical definition of a failed marriage?
If the Unabomber says to you "don't do that", while making eye contact for the first time in a decade, does it register? For Microsoft products, hardly ever. For Google, not quite enough.
I'm not taking any other version of the Turing test seriously until this one is dispatched.
Re:Redirects (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't find that fair. I have always loathed the "search from toolbar" hijack they built into IE. Then I found I had to turn off Domain Guessing AND Internet Keywords in Firefox, and the options weren't even visible in the UI. This bullshit has gone on too long. If the computer illiterate need this feature, at least give it a checkbox:
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/domain-guessing.html [mozilla.org]
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/internet-keywords.html [mozilla.org]
Now if you really are in favor of a free-for-all in this area, Verisign should go back to returning their own pages as a DNS result. I think they would have the inside track on sending a user where they did not intend to go.