Microsoft and Yahoo Reach Deal 301
e9th writes "We know that Microsoft failed last February in its attempt to buy Yahoo. Now, Advertising Age reports that they've reached a deal. Instead of a buyout, the two will enter into a revenue sharing agreement, and Bing will become Yahoo's default search engine. The meat of the AdAge article can be found in Yahoo News. This deal may give Google something to worry about."
Goodbye old friend. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Goodbye old friend. (Score:5, Informative)
Others may joke, but I agree with you. I'll miss them, but goodbye to my.yahoo.com and www.yahoo.com.
Re:Goodbye old friend. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Goodbye old friend. (Score:5, Funny)
And my Firefox's address bar search engine was only two days away from retirement!
Love the Yahoo (Score:5, Informative)
You gotta love the Yahoo, if for no other reason than Zimbra [zimbra.com]. More than any other piece of software, it's the "Exchange Killer" that we've all wondered about. It matches, feature-for-feature, Exchange. It's (mostly) open-source. It runs fine on Linux. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, KDE, Google Calendars/Email, and just about everything else, including my WinMo phone.
It's a god-send, it works nicely with basically no fuss or hassle, and it's owned by Yahoo.
Hey, if Yahoo goes belly up, I just hope they sell Zimbra to somebody who can take the good thing handed to them and DO SOMETHING with it!?!?
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You gotta love the Yahoo, if for no other reason than Zimbra [zimbra.com]. More than any other piece of software, it's the "Exchange Killer" that we've all wondered about. It matches, feature-for-feature, Exchange. It's (mostly) open-source. It runs fine on Linux. It works with Windows, Mac, Linux, KDE, Google Calendars/Email, and just about everything else, ...
They say that the internal project to make zimbra the internal email plataform at yahoo (like gmail is at google, under the Mona name) was handed over to a bunch of people that actually had Exchange Engineer as their work title. So, the Sr. exchange Engineer veredict was that exchange was better. What a surprise. Zimbra will probably get sacked.
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Yeah, too bad it's linked to my Flickr account as well.
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The bean counters at Yahoo! should care if a big enough percentage of their current users cancel their accounts.
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Which is why a few no name nerds on Slashdot whining about this aren't going to make them care in the least bit.
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Re:Goodbye old friend. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why a few no name nerds on Slashdot whining about this aren't going to make them care in the least bit.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to "irony".
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And how does changing the underlying search engine affect your yahoo account?
He already answered that. Changing the underlying search engine to Bng leads to him cancelling his yahoo account.
As well as 250M mail users (Score:2)
I got a Yahoo mail since 1998, I don't use it as my main account of course, my mail provider is fastmail.fm and it will stay that way.
I will cancel Yahoo account only if MS acquired Yahoo. I know what will happen since I am one of the people who used Hotmail before it was acquired by MS. MS wouldn't run a poster child of FreeBSD, PHP etc. with their own billions.
mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't a troll. You may not agree with it, but that doesn't make it a troll.
On another note what is with all these stupid names Microsoft has been giving their search engines these days? I guess all you guys who talk about how stupid FOSS project names are, are going to keep mum on Bing (soon to be named Bukkake or something another).
This is an especially good point here. First "LiveSearch" and now "Bing", and of course "Zune", what is with the people at Microsoft and naming things? The company is s
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Why would any company need to deal with MS to be competitive? Especially Yahoo? Honestly, before this move, there were three main search engines for the English-speaking world: Google, Yahoo, and MS (Bing, formerly "LiveSearch"). Now, for some inexplicable reason, Yahoo has abandoned its #2 search engine and decided to use the #3, and worst, search engine available.
To make yet another car analogy, this would be like GM seeing that it's #2 to Ford in the US, and deciding to partner with Yugo to make cars.
I just asked Google if it had any reason to worry (Score:5, Funny)
It said 0 results found.
Re:I just asked Google if it had any reason to wor (Score:5, Funny)
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I searched "Google antitrust investigation" and it returned this image [leconcombre.com]
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Now that we've got that issue resolved, I think I'll go check my ad earnings in Google AdSense, followed by checking my site traffic in Google Analytics, followed by checking a few keyword rankings in Google Search, followed by tweaking a couple of settings in Google Webmaster Tools, followed by checking for new posts on the Inside AdSense blog, followed by %@$#! [NO CARRIER]
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It is good for Google (Score:2)
There is a conspiracy theory that MS kept supporting Apple even in its darkest days just to prevent a possible monopoly lawsuit. Of course, the IE lunacy (which still goes on) and Apple's horrible management before SJobs broke the entire plan.
If Google had a credible rival in advertising business, it would prevent trust allegations. Not a real rival, a rival having 20-30% of market would be enough.
Moot point (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo search was useless anyway, so having bing won't change anything for me. It will give them great insight into how people use yahoo's web site though, which will probably allow MSN to poach yahoo users.
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Re:Moot point (Score:5, Funny)
So I use M$'s search and its like here's your answer 'dumbass' you should have already know it.
...yet something tells me that anyone who refers to Microsoft as "M$" has no problem using something called "The Gimp".
Google worrying. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah. [searchengineland.com]
Re:Google worrying. (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall Fake Steve Jobs had some rather insightful thoughts on this. [blogspot.com]
The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.
Re:Google worrying. (Score:5, Funny)
He missed out on the part that one of them gets shot as part of the tying process...
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Insightful? In what way? All I see is a bunch of Microsoft and Ballmer bashing with little in the way of content or commentary.
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Bing... (Score:4, Funny)
I think I just cried a little...
Re:Bing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Swing (Score:2)
Search-engine pr0n! Rule 34.
Google in trouble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cobbling together 2 inferior technologies doesn't give you a superior one. I don't really think Google has anything to worry about. Kindly take your rabble rousing elsewhere.
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Cobbling together 2 inferior technologies doesn't give you a superior one.
But it never stopped anyone from trying! [penny-arcade.com]
Re:Google in trouble? (Score:5, Funny)
Cobbling together 2 inferior technologies doesn't give you a superior one.
Hey, it worked for Reese's!
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Hey, do not deem chocolate OR peanut butter to be an inferior technology. Fellow chocoholics and peanut butter enthusiasts! Grab yer pitchforks!
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Re:Google in trouble? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think the "You got Bing in my Yahoo!" commercial would fly so well. I'm sure someone would misinterpret it.
Re:Google in trouble? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the "You got Bing in my Yahoo!" commercial would fly so well. I'm sure someone would misinterpret it.
I dunno - that kinda sounds like you captured the essence of the business relationship pretty well there.
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I think "You got Yahoo in my Bing!" sounds much better.
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Damn straight, it gives you a SuperInferior(TM) technology! Or, you know, just Super. With all the SuperShiny(TM) bells and whistles you've come to know and loathe! Well, we've still got the marketing to work out, but trust us, we will fucking bury Google!
Re:SuperInferior! (Score:2)
Actually, you StumbledUpon something... (sorry - bad pun.)
Microsoft never mastered the art of naming. When they go short they get things like Zunes that squirt and Bing.
So then they retreat by putting their properties menu into the name.
InferiorTech with the SuperiorityComplex.
Re:Google in trouble? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting how people side with Google on this site, even though they're guilty of many of the things people complain about Microsoft doing, such as putting out lots of side products that have little to moderate success, attempting to tie branded products together to create one giant platform, and collecting data on users. Merely suggesting a competitor could actually make Google worry about something is even labeled rabble rousing.
Re:Google in trouble? (Score:5, Insightful)
such as putting out lots of side products that have little to moderate success
I can't say I've ever even seen anyone complain about either company doing this o_O What are you talking about, and why is this supposed to be a problem? :S
attempting to tie branded products together to create one giant platform
Having a large platform is fine, if it's based on open standards, and people using third party clients and servers aren't shunned
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1. They don't charge for those side products, if you don't like them don't use them. Unlike overpriced software you're forced to deal with because it truly does have a monopoly on office software.
2. The first step to anything google is to manually go to google.com. Microsoft comes installed into almost every premade computer, with it's own software like IE and Outlook pre installed as defaults and using their services as default.
3. Google gives a very clear policy [google.com] on what information they save and why.
Re:Siding with... (Score:2)
Right, somehow people side with both Google and Apple because they combine legitimate gestures of OSS software but then make F Cordon Bleu to grind the back end. However, I distrust the Fall From Grace of both those companies. Having declined:
1. Hotmail&IE&MS Search&Palm (90's darling package)
2. Gmail&Safari&MacOS&Google Search&iPhone(2000's package)
I ran out of energy for ParadigmShifts and settled for a sludge of:
Windows&Yahoo Mail&Yahoo Advanced& WinMobile 6.1. Rea
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(Offtopic ramble: Gee. Ate them in Preview, then put them back. But why a 30 second delay posting even when logged in?)
Re:Google in trouble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but Google are also *not* doing rather a lot of stuff Microsoft did:
- They're not forcing you to use their products.
- They don't deliberately break backwards compatibility, using peer pressure to force you to spend more money to upgrade.
- They're not breaking competing products.
There's a massive difference between Google and Microsoft. I *choose* to use a vast number of google's products, simply because they are better than anything else out there. I'm *forced* to use Microsoft products, often at great expense, when I would much rather be using alternatives.
Re:Google in trouble? (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market which has resulted in (some) software being written only for Windows, which is then required to participate in certain work or play sectors of the market.
Microsoft has a monopoly on Office software by using closed formats which prevent competing software from participating (in any meaningful way) in the Office software market. Good luck going into work and saying "Hey Boss, go ahead and save $200 and get me OpenOffice instead of MS Office".
Microsoft has bundled numerous applications into its monopoly Operating System for the purpose of extinguishing competition in additional markets. Products such as Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express have taken huge chunks of their respective markets, or destroyed the market entirely.
This is because Microsoft is able to "give it away" by charging every user of a Microsoft OS for the development of those products, and automatically distributing those products to "every" (90%+) new computer.
I don't have a choice of whether to use MSN Messenger. I have to, because it comes on all of the computers at work, and thus that is what everyone at work uses to communicate.
No one uses Eudora anymore, because Outlook Express is bundled with Windows and has the same functionality. Eudora, on the other hand, has to pay their employees somehow.
Microsoft is in a unique scenario compared to Google, Linux, or Mac because of their OS monopoly. Even if you try to argue Google has a monopoly on something (Search? Advertising?), they haven't abused it to compete unfairly in other markets.
If I had the choice to use superior products instead of using Microsofts' products, I would. I do not have that choice.
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Showing that you, like many other here on /. mistakenly think of Google as only a search company - rather than considering how Google is an also-ran in many of the areas that Microsoft and Yahoo! dominate in. There's more to the web than search.
subSUPREME technology (Score:2)
Cobbling together 2 inferior technologies doesn't give you a superior one.
But it gives a subSUPREME technology! It worked for subPRIME, didn't it?
Everybody needs competition (Score:5, Insightful)
including Google.
Re:Everybody needs competition (Score:5, Funny)
When that competition arrives, I expect to read about it here, today is not that day.
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Re:Yahooing Google (Score:2)
Actually, yes.
I stuck with Yahoo because for a brief moment they had a couple nice tips to the privacy side. Now with the MeSs I will finally switch. Haven't decided whether Ask or someone else. (Who's Fifth & Sixth in search?)
But occasionally when I absolutely had to Google something, ... I typed "Google" into my Yahoo Search default homepage. It says this:
"You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers."
Kinda cute, like the old DEC Make Love - Not War joke.
Tech version of Stearns County Syndrome (Score:2, Funny)
This is why we don't allow cousins to marry...
What strange mutations/recessive genes are we going to see sprout out of all this coupling???
Re:Boo! (Score:2)
He's brilliant Mods, not redundant!
"What do you get if you cross Bing and Yahoo!?"
"Boo!"
Besides creating amazing Pun potential, it's a quadratic play on the old Zen koan. When MS Embraces Yahoo, scary things result.
Two wrongs don't make a right... (Score:5, Funny)
But two trains traveling a break-neck speeds towards each other with no sign of stopping makes me feel like throwing some popcorn in the microwave.
Yahoo's promise to discard data after 3 months? (Score:2, Interesting)
I switched from Google to Yahoo! search recently because Yahoo! promised to discard user search data after 3 months. I'm guessing that the switch to Bing negates that promise, so what search engine(s) are left that are both useful & ethical?
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I use and normally recommend Clusty which says in plain English that "We at Clusty don't track you." (http://clusty.com/privacy) and in legalese that they do collect "Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, referral data, th
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Why can't you just block cookies, or am I missing something here?
Hopefully this provides the competition Google needs to better their search results.
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You could check out https://startpage.com./ [startpage.com.]
(I have not tried to verify their service claims.)
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Yahcrosoft or Microhoo!? (Score:3, Funny)
Yahcrsoft or Microhoo!? Which name are they going with?
Or Yahsoft? Or Microshoo?
Binghoosoft?
Anyone?
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Bob
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I like "Anyone" the best.
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Bing - Bing is not Google.
Its recursive and good enough.
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Microyahtzeehooshat.
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Which name are they going with?
Bendover.
They'll deliver a personalized bendover search, if you like/want that sort of thing.
How does one Bing a Google? Yahoo! (Score:2, Funny)
this deal may... (Score:2)
... or, more likely, will not give Google anything to worry about. at all.
What ddoes Yahoo! actually do? (Score:2)
Great (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Agree on this. Yahoo is much better than Google for Japanese language search (and Google translate is a sad joke for Japanese; even when I take the time to read through the Japanese original I can often still not make sense of the English "translation"). There's going to be a lot of unhappy people here if they manage to bork that up.
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On a side note Yahoo's Japanese search isn't as great as people make it out to be. Here's an amusing exercise (For those who know Japanese):
Go to Yahoo Japan and type in 'Kousoku Basu' (Obviously in Kanji+Kana). Look through the results and note carefully that Yahoo's own (very comprehensive) domestic bus search + booking service doesn't come up. At least not in the first 4 pages of results I looked at. Also for
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What happened to Cuil (Score:2)
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This deal may give Google something to worry about (Score:2)
It diverts attention of competition authorities from a self-proclaimed "do no evil" search giant earning its money through rather unobtrusive advertising (and which has now even been given a reinvigorated major competitor), to a company that is no stranger to antitrust crosshairs and with a body of Findings of Fact [usdoj.gov] from earlier proceedings against it.
How do you measure search engine accuracy? (Score:2)
Does anybody have any ability to measure how good a particular search engine is? I'm not going to compare total hits, as searching for "linux" on both could result in 100m pages. Taking the reputations of the companies out of the question how do you determine which search engine is better? Do you have to know the inner workings of the algorithm to make an intelligent conclusion?
2 suggestions to new management team (Score:4, Interesting)
Open Firefox in your 30 inch presentation monitors. Let it open 2 windows and put them next to each other on desktop both showing same time.
Now, open these addresses.
http://adwords.google.com/ [google.com]
http://advertising.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] (I don't even KNOW live.com advertising url)
Act like you are a little company wanting to advertise your product and compare them, especially international language support.
I don't like Google, its policies etc. but there is a fact that they don't have competitor at all. Not because they send a secret signal to advertiser brains, their advertising system is way better that is all.
Want to compete? My nr1 suggestion would be "quality control" of ads. Give users chance to click "spam" in advertising or some sort of "thumbs down" scheme, use the already included MCafee siteadvisor for ads etc. E.g. there is no way to prevent Scientology advertising attack on Slashdot. If there was a tiny button like "spam" or "off topic", I would click it and have the really mattering ads show. It is not something can be done by Google or Slashdot.
For a long time, I don't click to software "want to download ...., click here?" ads too. I don't trust them, I go to site itself or a trusted, edited download site. That is where my "mcafee siteadvisor" idea comes from.
Those who will not learn from the past (Score:2)
Prediction: Yahoo! will suffer the same fate. Negotiations will continue until Microsoft has all the details on what Yahoo! does and how they do it - then the negotiations will fail and Microsoft will "innovate" the technology and claim it as their own. They've gotten away with this so many times already - and I'm sure someone will show up in this thread to list off the companies that made
Yahoo get more out of this (Score:2)
If like me you read the business section of your broadsheet, then you'll probably be a little happier about this.
For those that didn't, Karl Icahn has been a one man activist investor of late. While admittedly Yahoo has had no compelling game plan, Icahn has quite simply been shit-stiring the whole Microsoft approach in order to get Yahoo to cave in. Originally MS wanted to buy out Yahoo's search business - but what would that leave the rest of Yahoo with? Icahn has been vocal about Yahoo not accepting seve
I wonder how will they screw yahoo (Score:2)
and you ms boys, dont give me any shit - just days ago microsoft pulled another stunt with the open source release move and it turned out they did it to save their ass.
You mean, worse than Bing? (Score:2)
Isn't making them use Bing bad enough already?
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're forgetting the loads of people who get Bing by default with IE8.
Will Bing get better? (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you used Bing? It kind of sucks. I can only hope it gets better but I don't know - lots of people complain it won't index their websites although I've had no trouble in that area.
Or maybe I just search for things it isn't good at - things I want to buy and documentation mostly. The most amusing was the other day when I tried looking up information about Bing's spiders (that behave oddly - not always following robots.txt and changing their user agent to look like IE). Couldn't find a thing on Bing but Google found it right away. Conspiracy to hide the information or suckage?
That's another interesting point. Why is Bing hitting my site again and again and making it look like real users using simple one word searches but all from the Bing IP block? When I try to use the same searches to find the same pages I don't see my site come up. Hmmm. Either way it's easier for webmasters if everyone just licenses one or two major search engines (Google and Bing) so that you only have to optimize your content to be listed high on them. It's hard when they all work different and sometimes in conflicting ways.
Re:Will Bing get better? (Score:4, Interesting)
The latter, probably caused by the well-known fact that Microsoft is strongly focused on non-technical users. Obviously technical information about search-engine indexing practices isn't the sort of thing most end users would search for, so Microsoft doesn't care whether it works well or not.
If they wanted to *hide* the information, they'd try to keep it out of the search engines that people who *would* look for such information are most likely to use, chiefly Google. In the absence of any evidence that they've attempted that, I would tend to discount the notion that the poor results in Bing are a deliberate obfuscation, in favor of the more likely explanation that they just don't care whether it's any good at turning up technical information.
If you search on Bing for DateTime module, the docs for the Perl and Python DateTime modules do show up, but at #4 and #2, respectively. The same search on Google, predictably, turns them up at #2 and #1. Of course, anyone who actually uses Perl would go straight to search.cpan.org (personally, I have a bookmark keyword for it), and I suspect the Python community has something similar (at least, I would hope so). Nonetheless, Bing's relevancy ranking isn't putting the canonical information first, and Google's is.
I tried searching for Encyclopedia, and the top four results are encyclopedia.com (never heard of it, but it does appear to be relevant, albeit not great; I looked up mitosis in it and got eight paragraphs from Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, which is a pretty meager article for such a major topic, but it would be enough for most gradeschool reports), the Wikipedia article on Encyclopedia, the Britannica main page, and the English Wikipedia main page, in that order. So again, the two that obviously ought to be in the top four results are there. Actually, I tried the same thing on Google, and its ranking is just about the same (with, again, encyclopedia.com in the top slot; I have no idea why, unless having the search term in the domain name is a major boost).
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you used Bing? It kind of sucks. I can only hope it gets better but I don't know - lots of people complain it won't index their websites although I've had no trouble in that area.
Yep, I have used it. I like the maps.bing.com feature of "bird's eye view" which makes it easier to recognize a place I am going to before being there.
Also, I have lately been using it in place of Google search to avoid the miriads of spam sites (say, if you want to find *that* video in Rapidshare, or *that* hardware driver for win xp). One of the advantages of Bing (for now at least) is that it has not been invaded with "search optimized" crap sites.
Re:Will Bing get better? (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree about Bing sucking...personally I really like it.
I like the short 'preview' of the page in the right column. I like the photo search. I like the maps (and the aerial view is MUCH newer where I live than Google.)
Overall, I think it is a great search engine, and it is a relief to be using something other than Google. It's not like Microsoft is any worse than other companies that have achieved a near monopoly.
The fact that Bing is my default search engine on Chrome tells the story of how things are changing for the better.
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I actually avoid Google search. Don't get me wrong, it is still the best and not always and not easy to avoid, but I love GMail and I really don't like all my searches and emails in hand of a single company.
My search engine of choice is ixquick [ixquick.com]. It has a very good privacy policy [ixquick.com], e.g. you can use https and it's not storing IP addresses - I'm looking at you Google Inc. - that makes it the first place for me to go. Ixquick uses - among other engines - Bing , but I couldn't care less.
Most people here at sl
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Duh!
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I pretty much know what's going to happen to Yahoo in Japan.
If Microsoft ever fully takes Yahoo over, they're going to change everything around, and it's going to end up unpopular in Japan, or just die out. This is because Microsoft will no doubt enforce their own policies and code onto Yahoo, so that we'll be forced to use the shitty hotmail engine, the shitty MSN engine, and the shitty Bing search engine who's very name sounds like something a parent would use to describe what excrement is to a toddler.
G
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People have to get used to the idea that if you type information into a website, that website has that information. It's pretty straight
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Yeah this could be a big loss. I was just experimenting with some search similarity stuff, and Yahoo BOSS was orders of magnitude better than Bing and and Google in terms of result retrieval! Mod Up above please.
Re:Anyone tried Bing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bing is actually decent, as a first "serious" attempt at taking on Google. The search results are not as good as Google's (then again, Google's have been going gradually down, too), but it has a lot of nice features to allow you to filter and narrow down common types of searches, like restaurant searches by price, or finding good stores to buy something.
The drawback? If you're anywhere except the US, then it sucks. Hard. Search results are awfully bad, and all the nifty features that makes it different from Google are gone. I almost suspect that for non-US countries, Bing is just a skin over Windows Live Search, because its really night and day compared to US Bing.
End result: if you're in the US, give it a shot...regular search won't be as good, but many types of searches will have tools to assist you, bringing it up a notch. If you're not in the US, don't even try.