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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Bing is important. It's a good search engine, comparable to Google's quality and size. And it's the only competition Google has in the US and most of Europe. (Sites like DuckDuckGo and Yahoo pass queries on to Bing). Dumb errors like this SSL problem are embarassing, but the larger frustration is how despite years of having a good product, they have so little market traction.

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I have noticed that Bing is actually getting better. However, I still prefer Google for most things. Google "assumes" what you are looking for, this can be good or bad depending on what you are searching. Bing on the other hand is like the early version of Google, literal search with minimum assumption. I am glad it is there as a fallback from Google. If the Google servers go down or if they pull some crap like ban Google search from windows phone, Bing is a decent alternative.

One thing I really appreciate from Bing is catching upto Google maps. Throughout the whole Google Maps and Windows phone fiasco, I din't miss GMaps a bit, between Nokia Maps[1] and Bing Maps [2], there isn't much I missing out from not using Google maps. Infact, I would to love Google to catch up to Nokia by offering offline maps.

Another mention is their Bing Flight [3] search, similar to kayak minus their cookie/OS price manipulations. It also comes with an awesome price prediction.

Overall, Bing has some great products but if they really want to compete with Google Search, they really need to improve their algo.

[1] http://here.com [2] http://maps.bing.com [3] http://flights.bing.com

I think Google has like 90% market share in Europe, and most of the rest is taken by Yandex/Yahoo. Bing has a very tiny market share worldwide (like 2%-4%).

I didn't know that DuckDuckGo and Yahoo pass their queries onto Bing. Does anyone else have any information on that, it sounds really interesting.

If I recall correctly, DDG used to solely depend on Bing's Search API but now they use various sources including their own to compile the search result.

The problem is that whilst being 'close' to as good as Google is a real achievement, they miss by far enough that it actually matters to most people.

Sure they might be godo enough that if they are a default, lots of people won't worry about changing, but not being as good as Google means there isn't much impetus for Google users to switch.

Yep, they don't offer any huge incentive to switch. Google has a much more robust search and as an android user I actually like the integration into Now.

I think it's as simple as having chosen an awful name. Bing is physically difficult to pronounce and it evokes no meaning whatsoever.

Do you really the pronunciation difficulty and lack of meaning is so significantly different than "Google" was when it launched? It's more vocalized, yes, but only a single syllable for Google's two, and relatively noone actually think of "googolplex" when talking about Google. The sound "bing", I think, conveys speediness, which they took advantage of with the slogan "Bing and decide". It's a quick, sharp sound - as should be your searches.

You have to move your mouth into a strange position to say the word's single syllable. And it's an opinion, as common as it may be, that Bing is an awful name for a search engine.

When I first heard of the search engine google, I was immediately reminded of those childhood conversations about a number with 100 zeros following it. So yes, instant evocation. And maybe this would only happen with geeks, but that's exactly who they needed to convince to use their search engine.

Microsoft seems to have decided to ignore geeks and just markets directly to 'average users'. This to me seems like a very poor strategy. No smart people telling you to use Bing or Windows 8 and guess what...

Its so impressing how Bing manages to deliver search results as well curated as those from Google. But wait, I just remembered that is because of they rely on search results from Google. ;P

http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-g...

If you want to learn more about that event than just a ":P", Danny Sullivan's analysis at the time was excellent: http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-ac...

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