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Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, replicating Google search in terms of quality is very hard now (it is really, really clever) but 99% of users simply won't notice the difference between the awesomeness of Google and the pretty goodness of anything else. So - the question is : why don't Apple do this?

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It's a dangerous line of thought (there's a saying, "people who forget history are doomed to repeat it"): it is this awesomeness that allowed Google back in 2000 to overthrow the market incumbents at that time, Altavista, Hotbot and so on. Don't underestimate the power of "awesomeness", in search at least a significant number of users are ready to jump ship whenever something better and with less junk appears.

I agree - many people are waiting for Google's replacement. People were laughing at Bing's quality, but it is really on par with Google right now. It's just that people are habituated to use Google's search. You can test this with this tool:

http://blekko.com/ws/+/monte

Truth to be told, Google search results are worse than few years ago. At the same time, they look more and more like a christmas tree - ads and other junk (google products?, google plus results?) everywhere.

I still find Google to have much better results than Bing for complicated search, such as a brain dump of a few things about the subject such as a person or film rather than a more structured search.

I don't trust the results of that website.

Compare: http://blekko.com/ws/c%23+get+custom+attribute+/monte

With: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=c%23+get+custom+attribute

Blekko claims the first google result is "C: Summary for Citigroup, Inc. Common Stock- Yahoo! Finance", while google finds the relevant information.

That's because Google knows what you want based on their tracking information and previous searches.

Doesn't Bing do this too?

It cut out the part after the '#' character. You've got results for 'C'. It is a bug. Try other searches without special characters.

"People were laughing at Bing's quality, but it is really on par with Google right now."

This is definitively not the case outside of the US. At least not here in the Scandinavian countries.

Quality isn't just about search results. I recently wanted to try Bing for a week or so because people keep claiming it has gotten better, but I ran into a dealbreaker: no working search add-on for Firefox Mobile (even though Microsoft was trying to get the Firefox default last year). Plus the Bing search app/widget was disappointing: it kept trying to keep me in the app instead of integrating with the rest of my phone

In the bigger picture, Bing still has a long way to go.

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