Does Bing Have Google Running Scared? 560
suraj.sun alerts us to an anonymous-source story up at the NY Post, not what we would normally consider a leading source of tech news, claiming that Microsoft's introduction of Bing has alarmed Google. "...co-founder Sergey Brin is so rattled by the launch of Microsoft's rival search engine that he has assembled a team of top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service, The Post has learned. Brin, according to sources..., is himself leading the team of search-engine specialists in an effort to determine how Bing's crucial search algorithm differs from that used by [Google]. 'New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,' said one insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The move by Brin is unusual, as it is rare these days for the Google founders to have such hands-on involvement in day-to-day operations at the company, the source added." CNet's coverage of the rumor begins with the NY Post and adds in Search Engine Land's speculation on what the world of search would look like if Yahoo exited the field.
Oh that's so reliable (Score:1, Interesting)
Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
Your competitor releases a product, you analyse it. That simple.
When I worked at VMware we analysed every VirtualPC release both before and after Microsoft acquired it. There was a checklist of VMware "innovations" which we had metrics to measure how well VirtualPC didn't stack up against.
If you don't do this, you don't know why your product is better than your competitor's, and so you don't know how to compete with them. Unless, of course, you're like Microsoft and think "compete" means "lie".
hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
They probably should be scared (Score:2, Interesting)
As we're all fond of saying, MS tends to get things right on the third try (or just eventually). MS themselves got scared enough a few years back to actually put together a good search engine this time. Yeah, it took them awhile, but they've got a decent chance of becoming a good alternative to Google again. I've used Bing as my main search system for about 4 days after launch, and it was fine. I find myself alternating between google and bing about once per day now.
What if MS was able to use Bing to get back to a 30-40% search market share in the next few years? That would certainly change the dynamics of the search field again, and I think it would be changed for the better.
Competition can only help (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether or not the story is true, competition - even from the likes of Microsoft - competition in the search market is a good thing to have. Google has been been without serious competition in the web search market for almost a decade, and there are definitely ways they can improve the quality of their results.
Two things that most people will want avoided are 1) feature-bloat rather than basic s/n improvement as the method of competition, and 2) unfair use by microsoft of its (diminished) OS monopoly. Both these things were seen in the browser wars, and it took 5 years (more or less) for browser software to recover from that fiasco.
Bing doesn't work... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this might shock the US crowd, but the rest of the world exists too, and nobody told Microsoft while they were developing Bing's neat features. So what happens is, that all those interesting little local search and filter things are useless to everyone else and winds just winds up being Live Search with new branding.
I like the concept of the filters but they only work for a very small selection of US centric pre-selected results. In fact if it isn't on MSN.com it doesn't seem to exist as far as Bing is concerned.
So bing is meh, it was an interesting demo but just wasn't developed enough to be a real product. Google's unfiltered results are still much better than Live Search.
As much as I hate to say it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Over the last several years I thought it was my imagination or increasing impatience that has caused my increased dissatisfaction with Google's search results but when I think about it more closely pagerank has been around for a long time and it hasn't altogether changed much. With pagerank basically being synonymous with Internet presence there has been a ton of research into gaming the algorithm and finding ways to artificially boost your website's relevance and this has basically resulted in the increasing decline of Google's search results over the last several years.
Just as an actual example I was looking into buying a guitar amp online I had heard about and I wanted to find a website I had been to before on another computer that had a database clips demoing various amps and other guitar gear but I couldn't remember the name. After getting frustrated with several Google searches yielding nothing but trash for the obvious search queries, I turned to Bing because I thought it might be worth a laugh. First result was the website I wanted from the beginning, and that pains me a lot as someone who hates most of Microsoft's products as much as anyone else around here.
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree.
"Taking notice" might be an apt phrase to describe Google's reaction -- but even "concern" would be seriously overstating it -- never mind something like "panic" or "running scared".
Having said that, it's nice to see some competition in search, just as it's nice to see Macs and Linux keeping Windows honest.
An alternate to Google atleast (Score:5, Interesting)
At it's launch, there was considerable difference in the results of the two (Google giving far more relevant results). But Bing has been rapidly improving and now I get pretty much identical results from both.
Bing is a huge improvement over Yahoo at least for general queries.
It's a pity that Safari (at least on Mac) doesn't allow any other search engine except Google. That is just plain mean.
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft does marketing better than everything else they do? I don't buy it. Embrace Extend Extinguish comes to mind for starters. I'd say their ability to control the markets they are in is also more effective than their marketing. I'm sure there's more if i cared to keep going. There's a reason we've seen so many anti-trust lawsuits against them, and it isn't because they are great at marketing. I'd even venture that if what they were "best" at was marketing, they wouldn't be the target of so much hatred and scandalous news we hear of every other day at slashdot.
Re:Good. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is how market competition is supposed to work.
Evil or not, a Google without competition inevitably stagnates.
Yes but how did Microsoft manage to compete with Google's Search engine?
What I'm confused about is Bing's quickness. I mean, I've read so many articles and patents about Google doing such and such to make its searches so quick and responsive. Not saying that Bing is just as quick but I don't notice a difference. So what's up? Has Microsoft implement hundreds of thousands of Red Hat modified kernels on machines in huge server farms like Google? You know with special impossible to understand BigTable and networking technology? Has hardware gotten so much better between then and now that this can be done on Windows virtualized on a hundred beefy machines?
I know no one can answer my questions but it's one of two things: 1) Microsoft read what I read and implemented Google or (dare I propose this?) 2) Microsoft -- in a shocking move -- actually did something really neat and innovative. Bing is getting decent reviews but maybe the usage doesn't demand what Google has to perform.
Fast (Score:2, Interesting)
I tried a few searches on Bing, and one thing I noticed right away is how fast it is. It seems to be just a little snappier than Google. The search results seem to have equal correctness.
My personal anecdote with Bing (Score:3, Interesting)
I know that Microsoft is to be evil, and Google is to be the good guy, and /.ers mostly side with Google, yada yada yada...
All that asides, I'd like to say that, from my personal experiences, Bing is pretty good. I've been using it on and off since its launch, before its ad campaign. Note that I still use Google on an everyday basis, but Bing has been doing better and better.
I spent a bored Saturday afternoon, comparing the two, with different methods that I use everyday for searching:
In over half of what I put in, Bing came up with results that made more sense to me, and which are closer to what I'm searching for. I found that Google is more and more rigged with "hidden" ads, which is quite annoying at times. Maybe it's just that Google is better known, and all the so-called SEO experts work on it more, but it's still annoying.
That's just personal experience, and it's by no means scientific. YMMV. I, for one, welcome good search engine, even from the evil empire.
Crap comes from people learning to Game Google (Score:4, Interesting)
If getting your site in Bing's search results means big bucks, they're gonna Game that just the same. You'll see the crap come flushing in.
Re:What do you mean "If"? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.alexa.com/topsites [alexa.com]
Only one domain on the entire web gets more traffic than yahoo.com and that's obviously google.com.
In various countries in the far-east, Yahoo beats out Google to the #1 spot.
Yahoo is still a vast presence in search-engine-land.
And yep, my granny says "I'll google it" and promptly clicks on her yahoo.com bookmark. The term means "search" to many users, not any specific brand. In much the same way (at least in the UK) that someone might "hoover the room" with their Dyson.
Re:Oh that's so reliable (Score:5, Interesting)
The deal they made when they created the algorithms was that the computer wouldn't really understand what it was reading so that it could be fast. Unfortunately, it seems to have severe problems comprehending that most users don't want a page where the search terms appear across the entire page. Most of the time we want them to appear relatively close together.
Searching for bug reports and troubleshooting information tends to be extremely hit or miss with Google.
Which surprisingly enough is similar to the competition with the added bonus of having to sift through a larger portion of link farms and spam on Google.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried it after having read about their supperiority in porn searches. It was quite good, actualy, especially these video snippets searching yields. It very well may be Microsoft has found its niche in search market...
Good attempt, still some way to go (Score:1, Interesting)
I just think that as soon as Bing becomes a verb... it has leveled the playing field. People just don't search, they google. When people starts "binging" they MS will have achieved something.
Re:Uhuh (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Microsoft knows what the consumer wants" (Score:1, Interesting)
How's your Apple Pippin? What about your Newton? And your Quicktake camera?
The point is that part of innovation is attempting new products. Some stick, some don't. Clippy and Bob have not been used for years. The Zune is going to get better with Xbox integration and Windows 7 blows Snow Leopard out of the water.
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:3, Interesting)
And the link takes me to youtube; not very good marketing.
Torn.. (Score:4, Interesting)
On the one hand, the lack of a technologically compelling competitor to Google concerns me. As a consequence, google susceptibility to SEO gaming is significant, but Google doesn't have a sound business justification to change what is working unless a competitor outdoes them. Unfortunately, in business the only 'justifiable' time to fund improvements is when there is *something* to gain and Google simply has nothing to gain in this context without competition.
On the other hand, I don't think Microsoft should be the one to come in. They are another goliath that retains some good technical people, but strategically knows little more than brute force nowadays to get into markets. They bought their way into second place in game consoles, they are trying to buy their way into some niche markets where Linux currently leads (both in the server room and embedded spaces). They tend to offer generally 'mostly sufficient' technology that doesn't really stack up to their competition or blow them away on a technical level, but earns what ground it can by sheer force of money earned through the markets they did corner at the right time with the right technology (invented or purchased). Through dumping (and even further, sometimes essentially bribing customers to use their products) they pursue an obsessive need to take over new markets.
In other words, I want to see Google challenged by a competitor on the strength of the technology they offer, not on the strength of a massive marketing budget and the ability to blatantly lose money for future market share. I have tons of respect for Google for actually innovating and revolutionizing search while every major player languished. I want another google, not microsoft, to get Google back on its toes.
Compare them yourself, without branding (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare them yourself, without branding: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ [fejus.com]
This site basically outputs search results in three columns, with all formatting uniform, all branding removed and columns permuted on every search. You vote for the best results. I found myself unknowingly "voting" for Bing a surprising number of times.
The article is most likely BS, (Score:3, Interesting)
The article is most likely BS, written by someone who doesn't know how the Search industry works. Let me lay out some facts for you so that you see why I think it's BS:
1. Most, if not all algorithms that Live Search / Bing uses are PUBLICLY DISCLOSED in papers published by Microsoft Research, and the corresponding patents that Microsoft holds. You don't need to "identify" anything. And even if you did, the new features introduced by Bing are so superficial that "identifying" similar algorithms would not take Google's engineers and researchers much time.
2. All major search engines monitor each other constantly and they know exactly what the competition's NDCG metrics (normalized cumulative distributed gain - the measure of how relevant the results are) are. As a rule, it's undesirable to crank up the NDCG too much, since doing so reduces the click through rate on ads, so historically, Google has kept their NDCG just a wee bit ahead of Yahoo and Live, and every time the two would update their algorithms, Google would crank it up a notch to stay ahead. To think that they've been sitting on their ass in the past couple of years is stupid.
So at most, I think Google is working on some experimental stuff related to presentation of results, which is where it's currently lacking, in spite of their half assed, hidden-by-default sidebar.
Re:As much as I hate to say it... (Score:3, Interesting)
What was the specific search that you typed into Bing and what was the website you were looking for?
My experiences have been more the opposite way when testing Bing.
I'm sure we're all very interested in where Bing's strengths are.
Attention to Detail vs. Asperger's (Score:3, Interesting)
True enough, but it's also possible to pay too much attention [fawny.org] to details. There's always the chance of a misstep somewhere, but I think Google's most at risk if they pay attention to the wrong detail, or waiting for a large volume of data to make "the perfect choice" where the best course of action would be simply to make a different choice.
That said, it is still kind of hard to accept Microsoft as a credible threat, except that this is version 2 of their search engine. They might have some details right this time.
Re:As much as I hate to say it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? So what was your search term, because i find this very hard to believe without that tiny bit of proof, that would have been so easy to include??
Re:Oh that's so reliable (Score:3, Interesting)
Preach it. It's useless. It's shameful. It's shamefully useless.
I go looking for the doctor's office that is right next door to me (I need the phone number and hours). I know the name, I know the general address... I can't find the damned page.
Then my wife pulls it up in 20 seconds with Yahoo, and I seethe at Google. How could they let this happen? Beaten by Yahoo???
Unbelievably bad.
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:3, Interesting)
As a marketing strategy, the Seinfield ads sucked but were interesting nonetheless.
First of all, people were talking about them. Not exactly in a good way, but I can remember Slashdot posting article after article about them.
The second thing was the subtle message in each one of them. Every one of them had something to do with Vista. for example:
1) Bill Gates needing a Size 10 shoe instead of a size 9 = Vista needing a high end PC instead of a stripped down one.
2) Family accusing Bill and Jerry of stealing a giraffe but later turned out to be framed by family sister = Internet accusing Vista of sucking but later turned out to be spreading from a few sites.
The problem with this is it was never explained in the commercials. They figured that if you knew anything about Vista you would get it and had Seinfield talk about cake computers and Gates doing the robot instead of explaining the message they were trying to get across.
Yes, it could. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up - blind search test is quite useful. (Score:5, Interesting)
When you try the blind search test, the results look very similar. All the mainstream search engines are doing about equally well. There was a period in 2007 when Yahoo was substantially ahead of the others, because they had about fifty special-case recognizers for things like celebrities and movies, but now everybody has that. (And nobody noticed that Yahoo was better for the six months they had a technical edge, anyway.)
Try heavily-spammed searches like "London hotels". All the big guys are still being fooled by ad-heavy redirector sites. It's possible to do better against link spammers [sitetruth.com], but the big guys aren't trying very hard to do so. Google used to be against "search engine optimization", but some time in 2007 they went over to the dark side and started sponsoring SEO conferences. [searchengi...tegies.com] It's inevitable; Google makes their money from AdWords. Search is just a traffic builder.
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with you. 99 times out of 100 when you enter a company's name, you get several hundred hits for web sites selling the company's product, but you won't find the link to the company you are looking for itself. Or if you are interested in trying to do some research on [pick any topic] and do a Google search using that topic as a starting point, you will get thousands of hits trying to sell you anything associated with it. But with the exception of a Wikipedia link usually a few links down, you won't find anything useful helping you to research your topic. And then there is the issue of revenue generating ads. As long as web sites don't throw pulsating, gibbering, and epileptic seizure inducing advertisements in their margins or banners, I don't have an issue with ads. They have to make money and pay for their servers etc. (I do use ad blocker plus, so I guess this makes me somewhat hypocritical about this since I never check to see how many static ads it filters out... my preference would be that it allows 100% of the static ads through... a bit of carrot to counter the whip... but who has time to verify this?). So those static ads with words like 'buy' and 'price' etc. could screw up the search as well (I guess depending on how static the ads get :) )
People wonder why Wikipedia has gotten so popular. It is because it is the only place you can go on the internet, enter a search term, and have a reasonable expectation of getting a hit on the subject you want to learn about; without having to jump through all sorts of filtering hoops to ignore things like 'buy' or 'sale' or 'download'. Sure you can filter like that, but you also may be screwing your search at the same time. What if you are writing a paper on topics from actuators to zebras. You may want to know how much of your search topic items are bought each year, how much of a country's GDP was based on it, etc. while not wanting to buy any. You may end up filtering out sites that are useful to you. I gave a couple of random examples, but this can apply to almost anything.
What I would like to see Google do (and all the other search engines too for that matter), is create an option and associated algorithm to break out web searches into two fundamental/gross search categories:
I would like to see any progress on getting more meaningful results back from a search. I don't think we will ever see this since all the search engines generate their revenue through advertising. Ultimately, this means we are stuck knowing how much everything costs, but never able to find out what they are good for. :-)
Re:As much as I hate to say it... (Score:1, Interesting)
OK, here is the acid test. porn.
Turn off safe search, on both google and bing.
Search nude girls wallpaper. This shows up as one of the bing results:
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Nude+girls+Wallpaper#focal=20cab0835f80b0a47c8badc853d11a7f&furl=http://www.cutegayteens.com/nude-male-galleries-00325.jpg [bing.com]
I just don't know how that would show up in as a result for that search. Unless you were al least moderately susceptible to Search result manipulation.
That link on that result probably means that if bing starts to take off, it will get trashed by the spammers unless they make some changes.
Bing seems to have a fairly nice user interface if you are on a nice multi Megabyte/second line, but even then the image search spends a lot of time watching the spinning circles.
Re:Microsoft is a great engineering company. (Score:2, Interesting)
> Right off the wheel, I would say that if Microsoft is so terrible, why is no one in the FOSS movement able to come up with an IDE consistently as good as Visual Studio?
We tend not to like IDEs very much.
> Why is it that the state of the art in FOSS Office applications still has less features than Office 2000?
Because it doesn't?
> If Microsoft is such a shoddy company, where's the VB for Linux?
There: http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html [sourceforge.net]. Or Python / Ruby with Qt / Gtk, depending what you mean by "VB". Or Mono.
> If I look around Linux, the only big thing that's innovative is KDE 4.
You didn't look very hard didn't you? The most innovative thing I saw recently is how perl 6 reinvented regexes, I can't wait for it to spread to other languages.
Re:Yes, who can forget MS's great marketing (Score:2, Interesting)
Google is pretty much the master of 'buzz marketing'. The whole image of Google being cool and not evil was carefully crafted.
Plus as sopssa points out, they basically pay off people to use their stuff.
Re:Yes, who can forget MS's great marketing (Score:2, Interesting)
"Correct, because the best defense from an allegation is to find an example of someone else doing something similar to the allegation."
Except that wasn't what I was doing. I was illustrating the kind of marketing that MS could have done if they were really a "marketing company that has some tech leanings".
Let's face it, this idea of MS as a marketing company is just code for saying MS is no good technically. Some people can't accept the idea that MS customers might actually like MS products, so they use this concept of MS as a marketing wiz to explain their success.
The fact is that MS marketing has been significantly inferior to Sun's, IBM's and in particular, Apple's.
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:5, Interesting)
Commercials are "important" to marketing, but commercials are not marketing. I'm not aware of any major corporation that does its own commercials. They generally hire an outside ad agency, that then does the commercials, and whatever research defined by the marketing director. I wouldn't judge a marketing director solely by its failed commercial campaigns. (But failure to capture/gain a market is reason to fire one, and crappy commercials would be a culprit.)
Marketing is figuring out what the status quo is, then figuring what nature of product can be introduced that makes money, then defining the strategy to maximize market share/profits. When you think of marketing, think Steve Jobs and Apple, and how they got their overpriced products sold to a rabid minority. Yes, Microsoft does not have a genius marketing department, but breaking legs hasn't been what got Microsoft on top of the software world (even though MS excels at it and are quite eager to break legs).
Windows was a strategic decision. The advantages of a GUI interface to the ungeek masses was pretty obvious after Apple came out with the Mac. Microsoft saw that IBM did not want to drive OS/2 into the consumer market, or was too inept to do so, and then decided they had to eat IBM's dinner. IBM whines about being backstabbed, because they're losers who never saw the importance of the consumer market to their market share. They had a technically superior product, talk about being bad marketers.
It was WYSIWYG and the Office application suite that killed Wordperfect, and that was marketing's kill. Wordperfect sat clueless, then fell behind on what their customer base wanted. Late on WYSIWYG, then late on bundling a robust spreadsheet, presentation, and database apps to the wordprocessor. Why buy 2nd best or the oddball, when Microsoft sold you everything you needed, AND EVERYONE else used MS products (compatibility)?
Finally, killing Netscape was a coup for BillyG, if you believe the Businessweek article. Bill groks that the Internet is the new market, Netscape already "owned" it, and Microsoft had to make a presence from NOTHING. He quickly figures out that Netscape makes all their money from the browser. So MS offers a free browser, and sucks all the financial oxygen from Netscape. Add an email client, and support for every internet gadget, and the only competitor to Microsoft is the amorphous internet giving away a free OS (until Google). THAT is marketing.
Business tactics is creating a pricing scheme that puts only your OS on every computer built by a large manufacturer, and use it to threaten any manufacturer that tries to put on linux as an alternative.
Microsoft does not wait for their competitors make a mistake. NO successful business waits for their competitor. Microsoft treats each competitor's product like a marathon. They're so rich (and somewhat talented), they'll just fall behind and pace the leader, letting him/her break the air while they draft. Eventually, Microsoft figures out when to make their move. It takes exceptional marketing to redefine the competition in a way that the end result is making more money.
Bing is Microsoft's marketing answer to Google. The race isn't who puts out the best links to queries; the race is which search engine leads to the most sales. Bing may not generate superior search results to Google, but if you're looking to buy something, Microsoft is all over the experience. And its a simpler, more automated experience, because the unwashed masses are stupid, and appreciate people who make things easier for them without pointing out they are stupid. Advertisers will eventually want to throw money at Bing, because that's where they'll make more sales.
The NY Post story is a planted POS story, because Ballmer is the dumbest CEO with a job. Sergey Brin is not a money guy, an ego guy, or a BillyG paranoia "I must always win" guy. Google management whistled Sergey in, because they're not technical enough to determine the response. Google management took a look at Bing, figured out what's MS's game, and will make their adjustments. Meanwhile, Google's working on its game changer, which will probably be some form of semantic web environment; the Holy Grail of Internet search.
Re:Microsoft is a great engineering company. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and by the way, neither Qt or Gtk have a native grid that matches the grid controls used in Windows.
I've no idea about Gtk there, but what's wrong with Qt grid?
The only Linux GUI kit that has even halfway decent widgets is WxWidgets
Erm, are you seriously saying that wxWidgets offer better widgets than Qt? esp. grid?..
it falls short of what you can get out of Win32 native components.
You totally lose me there, given that native Win32 controls are very limited (they don't include dockable toolbars, for example, nor a proper grid). Comparing to VCL or WinForms would be more reasonable, though even then I don't see what they can offer that Qt does not.
Then there's WPF, but that's a very different story...
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you. 99 times out of 100 when you enter a company's name, you get several hundred hits for web sites selling the company's product, but you won't find the link to the company you are looking for itself.
Care to come up with some examples? I just tried four company names and every one had the company as the first result. It might not be scientific but very far from 1 times out of 100 then? At this point you need 396 search queries that gives no match for the companys website within the first hundret results.
Google is fine when searching for companies it seems. Asus even had a link to their norwegian site as the first result (I sit in Norway).
Re:Oh that's so reliable (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, Google's Japanese algorithm is so poor I usually end up using Google Image Search of all things (!) for regular queries. At least I can see directly from looking at the picture thumbnails if the result is remotely relevant or not.
Maybe no google but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't Bing implemented with FAST? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is deliberate! (Score:4, Interesting)
What you're missing is that this is a deliberate strategy on Microsoft's part that served them well for many, many years. For a long time, Microsoft sought to have the second best product in any given category. Then they would just sit there and wait for the best product to get lazy or stagnant and come in and sweep up the remnants. They did this again and again and again in the late 80's and 90's, and it worked every single time, because eventually the competition would trip up leaving the market open for Microsoft.
Examples?
The problem with this strategy is it only works when your competition slacks off. And nowadays Microsoft's competition--i.e. Google and Apple--aren't slacking off. At least Not Yet.
Re:Microsoft is doing what it's best at - Marketin (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:about marketing (Score:2, Interesting)