I'm *Really* Impressed by Bing Search

[Anderton]

It's kind of like opening a magazine, and seeing that the girl in math class who was teased cruelly for being a nerd and having braces is now a high-paid model for Versace. I mean, Bing? With the stupid name (although I guess no more stupid than Google), and its 3% global market share?

 

I've been using Bing search, and I like that it's a sidebar to the browser. It doesn't take over a tab with a zillion ads (at least, not yet). I also like how you can see what and how it searches, its conclusions, and the conversational vibe. For example, I asked who was calling me from a certain number, and it said:

 

I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find any information on who is calling you from the number xxx-xxx-xxxx. It’s possible that the caller is using a spoofed number, which means that the number displayed on your caller ID is not the actual number of the person or entity calling you (1). You can try using a reverse phone lookup service to see if you can find any information about the caller (2, 3). If you don’t recognize the number, it’s best to ignore the call or block the number if you can. I hope that helps!

 

The "footnotes" are links, but they're also shown as references at the bottom of the "chat," along with additional information sources and suggestions with related topics you might want to check out. The organization of the information is, at least IMHO, way better than Google. 

 

If Bing got enough of a head start on everyone else that they can own this concept for a while, that could impact Google big-time. If Google loses even just 10% of its market share, that think that might be a real problem for them.

 

[Anderton]

I wanted to see how fast the search function took in new information. 18 minutes after the previous post, I typed in "Does Craig Anderton like Bing?"

 

And the answer came back:

 

 "In one of his posts on the musicplayer forum, he mentioned that he is pretty impressed by Bing search(2). However, in another post, he mentioned that Bing is a second-class citizen in the browser world at best(3)."

 

Those footnotes go to the only time I remember mentioning Bing in here. It also picked up some of my bio from CraigAnderton.org in case I wanted more information on this Craig Anderton guy. Again, I'm impressed.

 

I then searched the same phrase on Google. It found a link to the forum post about how Bing was rumored to be integrating the ChatGPT engine into Bing, followed by a bunch of links that included Craig Anderton but were otherwise unrelated. The difference seems to be that Google didn't understand the most important aspect was whether I liked Bing. It apparently just looked for anything that had Craig Anderton in it, and if it had Bing in there, so much the better. It didn't pick up the most recent post.

 

I just checked my Mac, and the Edge browser has the Bing sidebar available there, too. 

[Anderton]

Next experiment - I asked "Can you write something about craig anderton's youtube album, 'take me back to tomorrow'?"

 

The answer came back:

 

Craig Anderton released an album called “Take Me Back to Tomorrow” in 2020. It is an album of 8 fun, danceable songs with a heavy Caribbean influence(1). You can find more music videos of Craig Anderton on his YouTube channel(1).

 

It then showed a clickable image of "Take Me Back to Tomorrow," along with other YouTube music videos I've done.

 

As to Google, it gave a link to the PreSonus forums, where there's a "Made in Studio One" sub-forum that mentioned "Take Me Back to Tomorrow." There were also links to some places that mentioned the album trangentially (e.g., where I mentioned some technique I used on it), but it never took me to the video itself.

 

My conclusion so far is that Google simply doesn't understand context, but Bing does. Scary/interesting/fun/unexpected/wild.

[RABid]

Google problems started when they began soliciting pay for preferred placement at the top of their results. Note that if you search Google for Cakewalk Sonar the first link is to a now defunct Sweetwater page where they used to sell the Gibson version. I wonder if the people at Sweetwater know there is absolutely no quality control to the search results they are buying? I've noticed that Amazon now does the same thing. Search for a product on Amazon and the first row of results is paid ads from competitors. Sometimes I have to go to page two of Google results to get a wanted link. And now that they push so many YouTube videos onto the top of their search results it is even worse.

 

[Anderton]

2 hours ago, RABid said:

And now that they push so many YouTube videos onto the top of their search results it is even worse.

 

Yet they didn't know to push the video I was asking about!

[KuruPrionz]

I'll give Bing a spin.

I've been using DuckDuckGo, which claims that it does not track you and therefore will not start dropping ads for things you looked at or bought all over your email and other pages. So far so good.

Now to kill gmail and find a better email host!!!

[Anderton]

I figured out why there haven't been any comments...no one uses Bing

[spokenward]

I put the Bing app on my phone and I just checked. The app is now full of generic retirement-aged actors and cable news features.

 

Google news will always try to find some way to hand me a "Warren Buffett thinks" story or a Forbes-slanted political piece. I know when I'm being trolled.

 

Bing-style just trowels on mid-brow shiny cable newsy items.   I forget what I was going to search for and flee. It is not working for me yet and I registered with an email address that they have interacted with for 17 years. 

[spokenward]

Okay, I opened the app again this AM.  You do have to set the level of precision by engaging with the "Let's chat" invitation.  I had a query and a followup. The restatement of my query in their format is the best part of their tech. You know if and how they understood the query. The "pretty printing" with footnotes pretends to be a little smarter than it is.  (I mean, footnotes, only smart people know footnote rules. My first instinct is to judge the quality of their sources and I was not overly impressed.)

 

I got an answer to my query in three tries with the Goog by using their Tools menu to limit responses to the last 24 hours. When I reopened the Bing app on my phone my two previous queries were not waiting for me. They had junked up the feed with News and Trending and more noise.  So I am a knowledgeable user of one kind of search and a beginning user of another. But one kind of search tells me that I am smart and the other tries to convince me that they are smart. 

 

It's kind of a ragged interaction so far, like finding the sales rep at retail who knows more about the service plan than the product.

 

[Anderton]

I wonder if we're approaching Bing from the same angle. With the Edge browser, I made Bing search the default search engine. It opens as a sidebar to whatever site I'm browsing, and persists if I change tabs. The feed hits only when I open a new tab. (However, since Microsoft downsized the news team, the feed became more cluttered with Bigfoot sighting articles and such, so I had to personalize it pretty heavily for my interests.)

 

I've been using Google since it was in beta (remember Desktop Google? that was awesome during its brief life). So using Bing is going against long-engrained habits. But I have to say, so far it's done a much better job of answering my questions than Google. It will be interesting to try Google's equivalent when it makes its debut.

 

Update: If you type aquestion in the address bar like I usually did to bring up Google, the browser opens a tab and I see ads with top placement, just like Google. I'm talking only about the sidebar that opens in Edge when you click on the Bing icon in the upper right.

[spokenward]

12 minutes ago, Anderton said:

I wonder if we're approaching Bing from the same angle. With the Edge browser, I made Bing search the default search engine.

 

Correct, I was using the Bing app on Pixel Android, not the desktop.

 

My Google searches were in Chrome. I have one desktop machine with Edge only. I will try the Bing features there. I was beta on Google too. I just got the invite to Bard.

[KenElevenShadows]

I am also on the waitlist to test Bard. I have not tested Bing (mostly because I don't really want to install another browser right now), but they've certainly created quite a buzz so far.

[Sundown]

It would be interesting if Microsoft got some traction in the web world, where they have struggled so often to get a footing.

 

Sure, Internet Explorer was used by many companies and people, but if it wasn't bundled with Windows, I don't think many would have chosen it.

 

Todd

[Anderton]

2 hours ago, Sundown said:

Sure, Internet Explorer was used by many companies and people, but if it wasn't bundled with Windows, I don't think many would have chosen it.

 

It wasn't called "Internet Exploder" for nothing

 

I've been continuing to comparison searches on both Bing and Google, and comparing results. It's not even close. Frankly, I'm shocked as well as impressed.

[spokenward]

This is a 4 screenshot illustration of the Android Phone Bing app. If you read the screens on this one it turns out pretty well. It's helpful and brief and it is mostly correct.

 

Notably the app does not use the Tabs feature of the desktop. So the punchline is the last exchange - 'How do I save this chat?' That's why we have the screenshots.

 

[KenElevenShadows]

<sigh> I don't know why I mentioned Bard in my last post. That's more of a ChatGPT equivalent, not a search engine. 

 

Anyway, I tested it so far, definitely not extensively, and it works pretty well at the writing tasks that I threw it. Sometimes, ChatGPT offered something of greater value/content, and sometimes, Bard did so. They seem rather different in feel so far.

 

Hopefully I'll get around to checking out Bing one of these days, though. Sounds impressive.

[Sundown]

I’m still using Chrome as a browser, but I just switched the search engine to Bing to give it a try. We’ll see how it goes.

 

Todd

[Sundown]

I’ve been using Bing now for four days, and I like it. Maybe because it’s simply different. I’m finding links and information that I wasn’t getting with Google. I’m still using Chrome as my browser, but I changed the default search engine to Bing.

 

I recommend giving it a try, certainly if you spend a lot of time on the internet.

 

Todd