[HN Gopher] Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google...
___________________________________________________________________
Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google - and Apple
could fix it
Author : fariszr
Score : 22 points
Date : 2023-10-02 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| olliej wrote:
| I've used Spotlight search on accident enough times to know that
| this is false :D
| meepmorp wrote:
| I'm not convinced bing really is worse than google search, at
| this point.
| kritr wrote:
| Having switched to both Bing and DuckDuckGo as defaults and
| then developing the subtle habit of searching via Google.com
| rather than my browser's search bar, I think I'd have to
| disagree.
|
| For whatever new niche of programming concepts I'm looking
| into, google generally outperforms Bing at finding relevant
| pages.
| andsens wrote:
| Get your employer to pay for Kagi. It has honestly saved me
| several days in search time over the last 1,5 years.
|
| The most prominent feature for me is that it only shows 0 or
| maybe 2 search results when there really isn't more to find.
| It's freeing, honestly.
|
| I used to verify it with a Google search like you, only to be
| confirmed every time. I haven't been doing that for a while
| now :-)
| mdhen wrote:
| Yeah i just switched to kagi a couple weeks ago and ita
| great, much less seo stuff and very useful results at the
| top. The only thing i'll still use google for is shopping
| searches, since kagi doesnt have that explicit
| functionality.
| fatfingerd wrote:
| I tended to get this impression with DDG because I use !g or
| !b only when I am dissatisfied with a ddg result, but !g
| seems worse than !b despite the expected overlap between ddg
| and Bing. Of course if you get adequately niche then Google
| should find something and not have spam, but I think they
| turned results off for anything sophisticated enough to
| return few results.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I can't imagine Apple ever buying and operating an enourmous .NET
| application. What would they be buying then, the brand? I don't
| see why Apple would be interested in this at all
| thelastgallon wrote:
| Bing is the default on the most dominant computing platform with
| 1.5 billion devices. At zero cost to Microsoft.
| aNoob7000 wrote:
| To be fair, Google search is the default on Chrome and Chrome
| is king of the web browsers right now. Additionally, Google
| search is the default on IOS and I'm going out on a limb that
| the same applies for the majority of Android devices.
|
| Google did a magnificent job of making their search engine the
| default on the most popular devices and software at moment in
| time.
| resfirestar wrote:
| Satya's testimony focuses on defaults, but in a really
| unrealistic way:
|
| >"Defaults are the only thing that matter," he said, "in terms of
| changing user behavior." He called the idea that it's easy to
| switch "bogus."
|
| Maybe it's bogus on Windows, which doesn't respect search engine
| or browser choice, but it's one step to change the search engine
| on Apple's platforms which is what he's talking about here.
|
| >Not only are the economics of the Google deal hugely favorable
| for Apple, he said, but Apple may also be afraid of what Google
| would do if it lost default status. Google has a number of hugely
| popular services, like Gmail and YouTube -- what if Google used
| those apps to relentlessly promote downloading Chrome, thus
| teaching people to circumvent the Safari browser entirely?
|
| Google already does this: click a link on any of their apps on
| iOS and it pulls up a menu asking to install Chrome or the Google
| app, your actual default browser being the last option. If Apple
| is afraid of Safari losing dominance to Chrome on iOS there's no
| way they'd allow this.
|
| >The very fact that Bing has market share of any kind on Windows
| -- which is somewhere in the teens, Nadella said, as opposed to
| "low, low single digits" on mobile -- is proof that defaults do
| work.
|
| Again this is not really a default like the default search engine
| on iOS, it's a situation where you have to wage an ongoing war on
| the OS as it constantly changes or ignores your preference. How
| much desktop market share would Bing have if Windows 10+ didn't
| open Edge and Bing for every unintentional start menu web search?
|
| >When Mehta asked him to respond to the idea that users can
| easily switch search engines, he said that "my only argument
| against that is that users don't switch." His best example: Apple
| Maps, which started out disastrously bad but has still gained
| market share in the last decade because it's preinstalled on
| every iPhone.
|
| Speaking of the OS ignoring your preference, Apple Maps on iOS is
| another example of this. It's not like a default search engine
| that can be changed, it's the operating system maliciously
| tricking people who clearly want another service into using the
| one the OS maker wants.
|
| >For Nadella, becoming Apple's default search engine wouldn't be
| about the money, at least not directly. "We needed to be less
| greedy and more competitive," he explained. A sudden increase in
| distribution, he said, would give Bing an increase in what
| Nadella called "query flow," which essentially just means more
| people would do more searches. More incoming searches means more
| data the Bing team can use to improve the search engine and more
| reasons for advertisers to come to the platform. An improved
| search engine gets used more, which means more data, and round
| and round it goes. This is the virtuous cycle of search engines,
| and Nadella believes Bing could use that cycle to quickly catch
| up to Google's quality.
|
| If the only way to make a search engine good enough to be #1 is
| to already be #1, as Satya seems to be implying, then it makes no
| sense to be in the search engine business.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-02 23:01 UTC)