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Has Bing Already Overtaken Yahoo? 319

nk497 writes "Microsoft's newly revamped search tool Bing has already overtaken Yahoo in the US and globally, according to StatsCounter. The net traffic watcher said Bing has topped Yahoo 16.28% to 10.22% in the US, and 5.62% to 5.13% globally. Though the firm noted Bing's popularity may drop off after the excitement wears off, the firm also said: 'Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo at a cost of $40 billion it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.' Google, of course, still leads by a considerable margin."
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Has Bing Already Overtaken Yahoo?

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  • Not really (Score:5, Informative)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) * <bittercode@gmail> on Monday June 08, 2009 @08:55AM (#28249795) Homepage Journal

    It's hard to see how someone wrote this post today - when the same site shows that Bing surpassing Yahoo! only lasted for a day. TechCrunch already pointed this out yesterday. [techcrunch.com] Bing may or may not have a big impact - but I think it will take some more time before we know whether it will or not. There is certainly a very long way to go before it even begins to approach google.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Exactly. Delayed news is okay. Old news which has not remained current is false news.

      >>There is certainly a very long way to go before it even begins to approach google.

      Not only that, but people's search habits are not at all easy to change. I suspect Bing will take a while even to approach Yahoo.
      • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:03AM (#28250521) Homepage
        Some of the articles in "IT Pro" magazine seem to me to be ads. Here are other articles:

        Can Microsoft make a success out of Silverlight? [itpro.co.uk] Quote: "... Microsoft's Silverlight weighs in at just a four-megabyte download, and apparently takes just 10 seconds to install." Another quote: "So how has Silverlight fared, and can it really topple Flash?" Silverlight is far, far behind Flash.

        Can Google or Microsoft get any bigger? [slashdot.org] Quote: "... Google, along with Microsoft, is so large and so dominant in its sectors, that both firms are hitting a point where their potential for profitable growth is limited." Another quote: "Certainly the pair of them own their key markets, ..." Google and Microsoft are not a "pair".

        This is the article, published today, to which this Slashdot story linked: Has Bing already overtaken yahoo? [itpro.co.uk] But that article no longer exists, apparently. Now that link takes visitors to another article: UPDATED: Bing and Yahoo battle it out for second in search [itpro.co.uk]. Quote: "One stats firm has said Microsoft's Bing has already caught up to rival Yahoo, just a week after launch - but it's since slipped back to third." Bing hasn't "slipped back to third", Bing has dived in the ratings, and is now far behind Yahoo.
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by kenbo0422 ( 1567789 )
          I can't see how anything MicroSoft puts out there could rival either Yahoo or Google. They don't really have the best of anything, the dominate by the 'deluge' factor. All the 'Live' stuff that's forced on you through MicroSoft Products has already existed at Google or somewhere else and MicroSoft being the Borg Monopoly it is, is just trying to break down the door in an area that most of us really don't want to see their footprints. Stick to the software you used to make exclusively, guys! They're so s
    • Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lord Byron II ( 671689 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:03AM (#28249867)

      I've submitted stories before to only have them accepted up to four days later. That's probably what happened here. Shame the editors didn't catch it.

      • by E IS mC(Square) ( 721736 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:06AM (#28249893) Journal
        Only if they keep themselves up to date by reading tech-centric sites such as slashdot.

        Oh wait...!!
      • Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)

        by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) * <bittercode@gmail> on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:07AM (#28249909) Homepage Journal

        It's not what happened in this case - tfa is dated today.

      • Re:Not really (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TropicalCoder ( 898500 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:47AM (#28250311) Homepage Journal

        When I saw this story on Slashdot just now I thought - is this a story or a paid commercial promotion? It is clearly way to soon to be evaluating the impact of bling (or whatever it is called - I am not paid to help establish brand recognition so I won't repeat it). It should also be obvious that there will be a lot who will click it out of curiosity alone and never go back again, as I did. Since Microsoft has made it clear that they intend to spend a fortune to promote bling, all articles become suspect since we are all well aware of how Microsoft routinely buys journalists and bloggers, and that in fact this is their preferred method these days. In the end, I arrived at the decision that this is simply a timley story like any other to the Slashdot editors who know that we are interested in all things Microsoft. Obviously this site wouldn't enjoy the success it does if they pass off paid commercial promotions as subject matter, but there are so many others doing this that if I were an editor I would take pains to avoid even the appearance of such a thing.

      • I've submitted stories before to only have them accepted up to four days later. That's probably what happened here. Shame the editors didn't catch it.

        Lucky you. I've got a submission over a year old. I'm guessing it's like emails at the bottom of the pile, they just get lost in the layers of time.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Mr_eX9 ( 800448 )
        I've submitted stories before only to have them rejected up to four days later. That's probably not what happened here. Shame the editors don't like my submissions.
    • Redirects (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sycodon ( 149926 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:05AM (#28249883)

      How long before M.S. sends out an update that automatically redirects URL typos to Bing?

      • by nschubach ( 922175 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:54AM (#28250423) Journal

        Tuesday. That's when all the patches come out. ;)

      • They get redirected to live search at the moment, and live search gets redirected to Bing.

      • Re:Redirects (Score:5, Interesting)

        by T Murphy ( 1054674 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:14AM (#28250621) Journal
        At work on Friday I mistyped a URL and it brought me to Bing. I didn't know what it was and assumed it was a re-routed parked domain or something - I didn't bother looking at it since I didn't recognize it. So my first impression of the site, thanks to the redirect, was that it was an annoying ad site.
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by williamhb ( 758070 )

          At work on Friday I mistyped a URL and it brought me to Bing. I didn't know what it was and assumed it was a re-routed parked domain or something - I didn't bother looking at it since I didn't recognize it. So my first impression of the site, thanks to the redirect, was that it was an annoying ad site.

          Same happened to me -- I was after bong.com, my finger slipped when typing the first 'o' and I get mysteriously redirected to this Microsoft search engine. I think it's a scam.

        • Re:Redirects (Score:5, Interesting)

          by je ne sais quoi ( 987177 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @11:25AM (#28251491)

          At work on Friday I mistyped a URL and it brought me to Bing. I didn't know what it was and assumed it was a re-routed parked domain or something

          The only reason I even knew bing existed was from reading slashdot. I'm a bit of a luddite so I don't catch onto the latest fads (e.g. I had texting is banned from my cell phone) but I think that it's right that the only people who know about bing are the ones who were looking for it, or are interested in computing in general. Therein lies the problem for MS. They could pour billions into advertising but I think most people tune out commercials nowadays, don't they?

          I don't have cable, so I searched for the bing commerical on youtube. I watched it, it seemed like useless fluff that's not going to convince anyone to try anything because they never actually said what their search engine did differently from google, except that it was better (better at what? finding restaurants? searching for back pain? wtf?).

    • by siloko ( 1133863 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:20AM (#28250057)

      Bing may or may not have a big impact

      Well a quick straw poll in my building suggests Bing hasn't even surpassed yelling down the corridor so it's got a looong way to go!

    • by wisty ( 1335733 )

      How many of the Bing searches for the term "sex" with the setting changed to India, with the user originating from slashdot? With the sparsity of non-google searches, a slashdotting could be almost significant.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by noundi ( 1044080 )
      You know what's hard to see? Someone using Yahoo. (badumpish)
    • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:33AM (#28250853)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Advertising? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kythe ( 4779 )

        I think it may have been less "advertising" and more leveraging Windows Live Search redirections and newly-installed IE8 defaults.

        Good for one day's bragging rights, I guess.

        Time was, that would have resulted in a new monopoly. Guess you can't go back again.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mgrassi99 ( 514152 )

        Funny, because my related searches for "the dark knight" are:

        * The Joker
        * Heath Ledger And The Joker
        * The Batman
        * The Dark Knight 2008
        * Superman The Man Of Steel
        * The Punisher
        * The Incredible Hulk

        Seems pretty relevant to me.

        You also get this nice little sidebar which assumes you're looking for a movie:

      • Re:Not really (Score:5, Informative)

        by shutdown -p now ( 807394 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @12:48PM (#28252513) Journal

        Apparently it is the same search engine they had when it was MSN

        It's not. You might have missed the story, but Microsoft had actually bought out PowerSet [wikipedia.org] to replace the old search engine, and that's what powering Bing.

    • Re:Not really (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JoeMerchant ( 803320 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:43AM (#28250981)
      It's an easy to anticipate effect - try the new thing.

      My search queries typically consist of Google, and not-Google, just in-case Google isn't getting what I'm looking for. My not-Google used to be Yahoo, but when Cuil was new I tried it for a while, the results out of Bing are much more impressive than Cuil, it might permanently replace Yahoo as my not-Google search engine, but when not-Google isn't the new thing to try out, it only gets about 2-5% of my search traffic, as compared to 30-50% when trying something new.
  • by peterdaly ( 123554 ) * <{petedaly} {at} {ix.netcom.com}> on Monday June 08, 2009 @08:57AM (#28249811)
    Not so fast. Same source indicates the bing has already fallen back down to (less than) live.com levels.

    TechCrunch: Bing was #2 for a day then Yahoo regained its place as Bing fell. [techcrunch.com]

    "As Matt Cutts [mattcutts.com] (who yes, works for Google) points out in the comments, StatCounter updates every few hours, so there is also data for today already. And itâ(TM)s more bad news for Bing. Itâ(TM)s now down to 5.65% in the U.S. â" yes, thatâ(TM)s less than what Live.com was at last month."
    • StatCounter confirms it.
       

    • Around a decade ago, it was enough to have a better search engine to get people to switch. But in the meantime, google has me hooked on mail, sites, and documents. Other people use other apps, but just like Microsoft snagged the desktop OS market based on it being the default on commodity hardware and then maintaining it with applications later, I believe Google will keep it's top spot on the same idea.

      Migrating from a search engine simply is a lot of hassle now especially since it's diminishing returns,

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )

        Migrating from a search engine simply is a lot of hassle now especially since it's diminishing returns

        Huh? Migrating to a different search engine is trivial; just set a different home page in your browser, or tell it to default to a different one for the search box if it has one. The results from Google are increasingly bad. Most of the time now the top hit is wrong, and fairly often it's completely irrelevant. Relevant results are getting further and further from the top and I'm having to go to the second or third page to get a useful result more and more often. If someone produces a search engine tha

        • Huh? Migrating to a different search engine is trivial; just set a different home page in your browser, or tell it to default to a different one for the search box if it has one.

          Not if you have your documents, code, mail, etc. With one search provider.

        • by noidentity ( 188756 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:14AM (#28250633)
          Agreed; Google is getting more on my nerves every day, partly because it doesn't do as told. I search for "foo bar" and it shows pages without any mention of "bar". OK, so search for "+foo +bar", and get my hits. Then try searching for "generic.h" and it returns pages with the string "generic" (no .h). Even adding a + doesn't avoid this. And then it regularly "corrects" my "misspellings", causing the wrong search. Once I finally get it searching for what I asked it to, it puts lots of irrelevant hits first.
          • by jefu ( 53450 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @11:50AM (#28251765) Homepage Journal

            Have you tried the "special searches". They have searches aimed at code for the major OSs - Linux, BSD, Microsoft and when I just tried it with "generic.h" in the Linux special search I got a bunch of hits on header files.

            But there are also some specialized code search engines around - though I don't have pointers to them, I've used a couple and they can be quite good (and, of course, sometimes quite bad).

          • by epine ( 68316 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @02:30PM (#28253857)

            Lexical processing is Google's Achilles heal. It's a royal pain when search results come back which silently discard odd-duck search terms. Try searching for "SAMe". Interesting, today for the first time, Google actually has a correct lexical match as the top result. The other day I had a search term where a punctuation mark was a critical disambiguator. That didn't work too good.

            One that I beat my head against all the time is electronic component part numbers. The full, full, full part number using ends in six alphabetic digits which describes the production variant, right down to what the production engineer ate for breakfast that morning. It's kind of like net, net net, and net net net in real estate. (Interestingly, today Google returns pages titled "triple-net" for a search on "net net net". Another small improvement behind the scenes.) You'll often get the net net part name in distributor's catalogues, but if you want the data sheet, you often need to search on the just the root of the part, if you can guess which prefix stem that might be.

            Of course, what you really want is to search on AT91SAM7* or AT91* depending on whether the programming technique in question applies to one part or the extended family.

            And please, for the love of God, when I type in the part number which I know in advance is correct for the datasheet I'm seeking, return at least *one* authoritative hit in the top ten from the actual company that makes the part in question (by the billions, in some cases). Argh!!!! Argh!!!!!! Argh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Some vendors manage to place themselves in the top ten for their own parts, most don't. What's the problem? Is serving up your own data sheet too much like support and not enough like sales? Are these companies deliberately detuning their search results? The situation baffles me.

            It's my daily sports fix hitting that little "vaporize into the cloud" button on top scoring results from alldatasheets.com which teases but doesn't deliver.

            I suspect its not zero cost to extend Google to fully handle the long, long, long tail of variously truncated designator strings.

            Another one: when I type "R" I mean the R language. Always. Get over it. If Google is going to gather my click trail, there's the one main thing they need to digest on my behalf. Thousands of queries over on r-seek and they still don't get it, usually discarding the term "R" entirely if it doesn't fit their prebuilt result for the companion search terms. +R doesn't work well either, as it forces Google to return every document index with an "R" subsection.

            This is something that no software application has yet achieved. It's the baby Turing test. Identify three to ten personal-style hot buttons of the particular user, and then *don't do them*.

            Instead, we've invented the world's shortest short bus: the software watches me replace with the original text the auto-correct garbage just inserted by Word (if I'm in for a bout of self-flagellation) or some other high-function IDE, and then auto-correct restores the thing I just manually deleted. Several times in a row, in a pique of futility. Isn't that the technical definition of a failed marriage?

            If the Unabomber says to you "don't do that", while making eye contact for the first time in a decade, does it register? For Microsoft products, hardly ever. For Google, not quite enough.

            I'm not taking any other version of the Turing test seriously until this one is dispatched.

          • by eulernet ( 1132389 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @02:50PM (#28254147)

            For searching code, use Code Search: http://google.com/codesearch [google.com]
            It's a lot more relevant.

            But I agree that the new Google is irritating, with its pitiful attempts to correct spelling.
            This is what you get when you dumb down the interface.

          • Re:Unlearn (Score:3, Insightful)

            by b4dc0d3r ( 1268512 )

            I wonder if we're just getting older.

            You see, back in the day, we had to learn assembler to write programs. Then they made C and other higher-level languages. And then interpreted languages. but even when writing VB.NET or C#, in my head I'm doing the equivalent of the original C++ to C translator, adding C to ASM on one side and OOP to C++ on the other side.

            I sometimes wonder that, back when search sucked (right around the time of Northern lights / AltaVista) I could find anything. It wasn't persistenc

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          The small database is probably what makes Clusty more useful, that and the fact it's not a target for spammers looking to get their malware laden sites higher up the search results.
          Many such spammers only target google, and don't even bother attacking yahoo or msn...

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Zerth ( 26112 )

        Bing does have that "see bits of videos straight from the search page by hovering over the image" feature. I'm sure they'll remove it as soon as publishers and porn sites complain.

      • Bing is not better yet.

        > A far cry from the horrendous "portal"idea that Yahoo, MSN, comcast.net, AOL, and others are still attached too.

        I would suggest that the "porn search" public argument works.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by SCHecklerX ( 229973 )

        Odd how I used to use google as the better search engine, but Yahoo! for maps, tv listings, movie listings, weather, etc.

        They blew it.

        When I gave mom a new computer, I really *wanted* to just give her a yahoo account instead of gmail. But they won't allow imap without paying them for it? wtf? Then there's what they did to the tv and movie listings, and the general fuckuppery of the entire site so they could be 'cool' with that 'web 2.0' stuff.

        Yeah. They had a good thing, and an edge. And pissed it all

  • by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Monday June 08, 2009 @08:59AM (#28249827) Journal
    I'm skeptical of this data--at least worldwide. When I click the gs.statcounter.com link and go to Statistic:Search Engine and Country/Region:Asia I see Baidu at an alarmingly low rate. Barely even recognizable. The CSV sheet shows it at zero until 03/05/2009 which is hilarious and then it bumps up to 1%. Yeah, I think they have some problems with their data collection methods or who is reporting this data anyhow. Maybe their software's only in English? I don't know but that data alarms me and I would take their stats in other realms lightly as that's a vote of no confidence from me--something is skewed horribly and I don't like it. They might be right about Yahoo! compared to Bing but this is certainly not reassuring.
  • Bada (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mana Mana ( 16072 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:01AM (#28249853) Homepage

    Bing Is Not Google

  • They had a prime time commercial where I live. I saw it, and I could tell it was going to be a bing advert so I paid attention. So my wife paid attention too, and the first thing she said after the commercials was... "Biiiiing". So it was catchy and probably stuck in her head (buy my years of "just use google" still remains).

    Yahoo might be worried, but I don't think Google cares... at this point it's a race for second place.
    • MS is pouring a ton of money into advertising bing. I was watching a few episodes of the new Full Metal Alchemist on hulu yesterday and every episode had nothing but adds for a big bing promotional that is going to be live on hulu. They are calling it Bingathon [webpronews.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SolitaryMan ( 538416 )

      Yahoo might be worried, but I don't think Google cares... at this point it's a race for second place.

      I wouldn't be so sure.

      I tried Bing and it is quite good. It beats Google in many of my "usual" searches.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gaspyy ( 514539 )

        I second this. If you check my posts, I don't think I ever written something positive about MS, but for the last few days I've been playing with Bing side by side with Google.

        My findings so far:
        - Bing's index is noticeably smaller than Google's; searching for very specific keywords simply do not show some results (I wasn't searching for porn)
        - In 90% of the cases, Bing's results were similar to Google's, basically same results with small differences in ordering (#4 becomes #2, #3 is #6, etc.)
        - The remaining

  • by castironpigeon ( 1056188 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:03AM (#28249861)
    I did a little experiment. I loaded up IE, hit the search button, typed something in, and ran the search. Whaddayaknow, Bing comes up with the search results. So every idiot that has the same Windows installed as the day they brought it home from Walmart with IE as the default browser and the little search button as their only gateway to the world is going to use Bing whether they know it or not. Apparently there are quite a few such idiots. Are we surprised?
    • by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:15AM (#28249999)

      I did a little experiment. I loaded up IE, hit the search button, typed something in, and ran the search. Whaddayaknow, Bing comes up with the search results. So every idiot that has the same Windows installed as the day they brought it home from Walmart with IE as the default browser and the little search button as their only gateway to the world is going to use Bing whether they know it or not. Apparently there are quite a few such idiots. Are we surprised?

      People like you are why IT people get a bad rap.

      Why is someone an "idiot" who does not care what search engine or browser they use? You are into (or do it professionally) IT, so this sort of thing is important to YOU. I bet in other fields, maybe for example sake investing, people could say "Wow, you're an idiot for not performing a split. Moron!"

      Fact is different things are important to different people. It doesn't make them an idiot.

      • by Kamokazi ( 1080091 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:42AM (#28250239)

        No, the real reason IT people get bad raps is because they are cranky from dealing with idiots all day. We don't call people idiots or morons because we think they are generally stupid. Idiot is easier to say than "inexperienced or complacent user". I refer to inexperienced or complacent users as idiots (or other equally derogatory word) when talking to other "IT people" (professionaly or not) all the time for simplicity (and probably as a vent for frustration).

        I know full well they are not stupid (most of them), heck I've called some of the smartest people I know idiots or morons because they couldn't handle a computer to save their life. We use terms like that as a reference to their computer skill, not overall intelligence. If some other IT guy refers to someone as an idiot, I immediately know their skill level with using a computer is limited to being able to check Facebook, or less.

        Maybe you should just lighten up and take less offense? It's not like we call people idiots to their faces. Unless they really deserve it.

      • Fact is different things are important to different people. It doesn't make them an idiot.

        Mhm. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1236397&cid=27995845 [slashdot.org]

  • This morning, our dear leader Steve Ballmer is unveiling our completely new search service, unrelated to anything we at Microsoft have ever done before [today.com]: Bob Hope.

    We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search^W^W Live Search^W^W Kumo sucked 'cause you're just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passe, dahling.

    So today we're introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We've sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram's brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.

    So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.

    And just look at these results!

    What do we want?
    Braaains.
    When do we want them?
    Braaains.
    What do I need to run Windows 7?
    Braaains.
    What's Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded?
    Braaains.
    What's the final proof of Steve Ballmer's equal genius to Steve Jobs?
    Vistaaa.

    This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It'll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can't name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD'S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We're Microsoft. We're serious as a heart attack on this one.

  • by hal2814 ( 725639 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:05AM (#28249879)

    You know the next onslaught of Bing ads will claim:

    "More popular than Yahoo!"*

    * For one day after weeks of massive advertising, Bing beat out Yahoo in website traffic. Results not typical.

    • Not going to happen. Yahoo! is at around 5% of the total market. We all know about it, because we remember when it was at the top, but for most people if you say 'better than Yahoo!' they say 'huh? Better than what? Is Yahoo a thing you Google with?'. All that kind of advert would do is draw people's attention to the existence of Yahoo.
  • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:07AM (#28249911)

    1. Their marketing strategy seems to be to push the name 'Microsoft' as far away as possible. Interesting they view their own name as a liability in this space.

    2. 'Bing is not google' abbreviation seems particularly weird. Suggesting that currently google has an oppressive, monopolistic grip on the search industry, leaving little choice but to have to go with them as they are the defacto standard. The company that wants to save a market from an oppressive, de-facto standard monopoly is.... Microsoft?

    • by JordanL ( 886154 )
      Bing is seriously a backronym for "Bing is not google"? Wow. Here I thought it was just one of the cheapest 4 letter domains they could buy... then they went and decided to "GNU" their name...
      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        Allegedly it is at least internal to microsoft.

      • Bing is seriously a backronym for "Bing is not google"? Wow. Here I thought it was just one of the cheapest 4 letter domains they could buy... then they went and decided to "GNU" their name...

        They didn't decide to do anything. A backronym can be constructed for anything.

        A backronym is a reverse acronym, a phrase constructed after the fact to make an existing word or words into an acronym. Backronyms may be invented with serious or humorous intent, or may be a type of false or folk etymology.

      • Yeah, I thought that was a joke. It seems strange to try to make it about not-being Google when people use Google because it works well and people like it. They may as well call it "Bing does not work well and you won't like it", but I guess "Bdnwwaywli" is a little harder to pronounce.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jgtg32a ( 1173373 )
        The word you are looking for is recursive acronym

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_acronym [wikipedia.org]
  • by oodaloop ( 1229816 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:11AM (#28249963)
    I dated your sister until you told me not to? BING! Needlenose Ned! BING!

    Man, I've seen that movie so many times.
  • With a multimillion dollar ad campaign in full swing, of course people are going to visit Bing. I haven't seen a yahoo ad in months (print, web, or broadcast media)... but I'm going to bet Yahoo has more return visitors.

  • ...is the integrated "porn theater" feature. Turn off SafeSearch (or w/e they call it, I care so little I forgot already), look up any porn search term - et voila! watch the videos right in the search results window.

    Looks like they're trying to kill off Redtube, not Google :D
  • wait until the "new" wears off and people will go back to their old favorites, google, yahoo, askJeevs' & etc... whatever, people are going to bing to see what it is capable of and when they are done they will leave, i am sure the microsofties & msn users will gravitate to bing, but not all...
  • by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @09:59AM (#28250491) Journal
    Was a test search I entered into bing to compare with what came out for google and yahoo.

    google returned these three first:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_antitrust_case
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/microsoft-antitrust.html

    So I compared that to Yahoo:

    http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/
    http://www.zdnet.com.au/tag/anti_trust-eu-microsoft.htm
    http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744,39202361,00.htm

    Bing returned these three first:

    http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/legalnews.mspx
    http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/legal_newsroomarchive.mspx?case=Government%20Anti-Trust%20Case
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust_case

    If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. - Joseph Goebbels

  • FYI (Score:5, Funny)

    by T Murphy ( 1054674 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:16AM (#28250649) Journal
    If you don't know what Bing is, you should just Google it.
  • Not acid3 compliant? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anna Merikin ( 529843 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:17AM (#28250657) Journal

    I just installed Opera-10 beta bc Opera says it is 100% acid3 compliant, and went over to Bing and chose to search for an image. When I tried to modify the search filter settings from the default (moderate) to no filter, the popup that had the checkboxes appeared UNDER the image windows, making a selection impossible.

    As usual MS seems to be ignoring standards.

  • Forced (Score:3, Interesting)

    by n3tcat ( 664243 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @10:31AM (#28250827)

    Of course Bing has overtaken Yahoo. They just flipped the Live search over to Bing, and the media hype machine filled in the rest.

    At work, where our security settings prevent changing the homepage or default search engine, any mistyped URL automatically rolls over to Bing now, without any prompting from our IT staff.

  • by Locutus ( 9039 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @11:30AM (#28251567)

    So "Bing" is another name for MS search but we are supposed to believe they jumped Yahoo by changing the name? That would mean not only would have all the previous MS search lemmings basically stayed put and people jumped from Google and/or Yahoo. That's just dumb and I have no doubt this is just another Microsoft marketing gimmick so more lemmings might get a warm and fuzzy feeling thinking there weren't the only ones using MS Bing. But, knowing Microsoft, maybe they did an OS patch which "fixed" the default search field for everyone using Windows and now they all use Bing. Or they only did that to the ones naive enough to still be using MS Vista. IMO.

     

    What made me laugh when I tried MS Bing was when the search returned something like 6 pages but from page 3 onward all it did was reshowed the same last page of search results.

     

    LoB
     

  • by Ruger ( 237212 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @11:45AM (#28251723) Homepage

    Didn't even know they were still around.

  • It's Yahoo (Score:3, Funny)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @11:53AM (#28251783) Homepage Journal
    The search thingy on slashdot gets more hits than the two of them combined.
  • by Tragedy4u ( 690579 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @11:55AM (#28251817)
    Bing, the search engine that'll return more links than you can throw a chair at!
  • Good, Bad, Ugly (Score:4, Insightful)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @12:29PM (#28252203) Homepage

    Good - Easy to use, decent results, refreshing look.
    Bad - Poor related links.
    Ugly - Can't try out everything because I don't have silverlight on my laptop and cell phone.

    I'm wondering if bing is more about Silverlight than it is about being better than MSN Search or Live.

  • bing sucks: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Monday June 08, 2009 @02:13PM (#28253591) Journal

    I tried it out a couple of times, and it insists on offering me Finland-related search results. This made it completely useless for me. I guess it does the same for users from other countries - gives search results specific to the searcher's geographic location. Well, that's bullshit.

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

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