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Microsoft Advertising

After 10 Years, Bing Is 'Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore' (bnnbloomberg.ca) 129

Posted by EditorDavid from the Bing-goes-the-internet dept.
Bloomberg remembers the launch of Bing ten years ago -- "It was all a little sad". There was even a jingle-writing contest in which song-a-day writer Jonathan Mann won a $500 gift card for his song "Bing Goes the Internet". (After TechCrunch called it "awful" and compared it to the sound of dying cows, the songwriter released a second song which consisted of nothing but the text of TechCrunch's article.)

Now Bloomberg asks, "How did Bing go from a joke to generating nearly three times the advertising revenue of Twitter?" What seemed like a typical Microsoft reaction to fear of Google has become -- with the help of blood, sweat, tears and the Nadellaissance -- a nice business. Microsoft now generates about $7.5 billion in annual revenue from web search advertising. That is a pipsqueak compared with Google's $120 billion in ad sales over the last 12 months. But it's more revenue brought in by either Microsoft's LinkedIn professional network or the company's line of Surface computers and other hardware...

Microsoft in recent years outsourced chunks of its advertising business and stuck Bing in spots that Microsoft controls or that Google couldn't grab. Importantly, Microsoft made Bing front and center for people using search boxes on Windows computers and Office software, practically guaranteeing that a healthy share of PC owners would wittingly or unwittingly use the "decision engine." Research firm comScore estimates Microsoft accounts for a little under one-quarter of U.S. web searches conducted on desktop computers. Microsoft's market share is far smaller outside the U.S. and practically nonexistent on smartphones... [T]his year it struck a deal to handle searches and ads tied to searches on Yahoo, AOL and other Verizon Communications Inc. internet properties. Those aren't glamorous corners of the internet, but they have a lot of traffic and therefore a lot of people searching for running shoes and local dentists. All that helps use of Bing and lifts the ad revenue that flows through Microsoft's accounts.

Microsoft has also pared costs to the point where Bing stopped bleeding red ink... Bing at least stands on its own two feet, and company executives have said that Microsoft has learned from the search business how to run big data-collecting and crunching technologies.
The article argues that Bing's success has been good for Google, since it keeps them from looking like a monopoly.
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After 10 Years, Bing Is 'Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore' More

After 10 Years, Bing Is 'Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore'

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  • Play to your strengths (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gtall ( 79522 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @01:37PM (#58691546)

    Way to go, MS, trickery over honest work.

    • Anti-Trust violation that Google is currently being investigated for?

      While Microsoft only has 25 percent or less of the search market, they have 95+ percent of the operating system market and are leveraging it to prop up their web search business via bundling. Sure sounds like something the DoJ or FTC or whoever should be looking into...

    • So changing business strategies are described as "trickery"when MS does it but when everyone else does the same thing they get a big attaboy? The three top threats to your privacy are Google, Twitter, and Facebook but since they are not MS products they get to do pretty much anything when you willingly feed your data into these applications. People willingly feed their person data into these application and never bother to read the terms of service when using their cervices. Google, Twitter, and Facebook w

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        MS didn't change their business strategy, they simply kept the same strategy they've always had. Where have you been...and stop smoking that, it's bad for you.

      • I think the trickery he is talking about would more involve Microsoft making Bing the default search engine on their browsers. There are a lot of businesses that run Windows and have the system locked down so the users can't change the preferences. That means if they want to use some search engine other than Bing, they have to manually type in that web address and then perform their search.

        As for the privacy issue, I doubt Microsoft is any better than the three evils you listed. Personally, I don't trust an

      • Twitter a threat to privacy?

        How are they a threat to the privacy of someone who doesn't actively engage in their platform?
        Google and FB though are on a totally different level. Shadow profiles, wholesale stalking of search and location data, etc etc.

        Compared to the other two, twitter is akin to Italy in WWII.

    • Re:Play to your strengths (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert AT slashdot DOT firenzee DOT com> on Saturday June 01, 2019 @02:06PM (#58691710) Homepage

      Indeed there's just no compelling reason to use bing, it seems to be inferior or at best on par with google in every way. I doubt there are many people who use it by choice. This is pretty much the standard MS business model and always has been since IBM handed them a huge market share with dos.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kriston ( 7886 )

          ...the SEO scum have frankly figured out how to spam the living shit out of Google with what is known as "Link Juice" so that it really doesn't matter what you search for, odds are you are gonna find a lot of spammy bullshit because the SEO scum have already figured out how to game Google's system very well.

          This is also why I prefer Bing. The better search results and free Xbox Live are nice, too.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, they cannot do solid engineering (as recent events nicely demonstrate), so trickery is all they have. To be fair, trickery works well on most people or MS would not be more than a footnote in tech history.

  • In a word: (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Porn.

    • Porn.

      Not just porn. They've allowed advertising revenue in the form of banner overlays and pre-video ads from in-window porn, so the porn hosts have a real incentive to provide that material and make sure it works great. Well, at least that's what my friend Brian told me.

  • That should be their slogan.

  • "'Not the Laughingstock of Technology Anymore' "

    Now it's the whole planet laughing about that sentence.

  • Just Bing it (Score:4, Informative)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @01:48PM (#58691620) Journal

    "Just Bing it"

    Yeah, that catchy slogan took off like a lead balloon.

    If someone actually said that to me in real life I'd laugh in their face, then I'd make a note to never have anything to do with them again.

    • I would definitely play the video for Bing Bing by AoA and laugh until the song was over.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tukz ( 664339 )

      People laugh when I say "Just Duck it" :(

      I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on all my devices.

      • People laugh when I say "Just Duck it" :(

        DuckDuckGo is my preferred search engine; but I’d laugh if I heard someone say “just duck it”.

        I make it a point to not say “just google it”, although a few times I’ve said “just google it with DuckDuckGo” because that seems to get people’s attention.

        • I make it a point to not say âoejust google itâ, although a few times Iâ(TM)ve said âoejust google it with DuckDuckGoâ because that seems to get peopleâ(TM)s attention.

          I'm going to start telling people that I bing it on google.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by timholman ( 71886 )

      "Just Bing it"

      If someone actually said that to me in real life I'd laugh in their face, then I'd make a note to never have anything to do with them again.

      If someone said "Just Bing It" to me, my reply would be: "If I wanted the wrong answer from someone pretending to be an expert, I'd call my mother-in-law."

    • If someone actually said that to me in real life I'd laugh in their face, then I'd make a note to never have anything to do with them again.

      No. You wouldn't. But it does sound edgy and cool on the intarwebz though, doesn't it?

      • No. You wouldn't. But it does sound edgy and cool on the intarwebz though, doesn't it?

        Yes, I would. But I admit, it's not half as hilariously shallow-sounding as someone who bills herself as a "Social Media Handywoman" for a balloon company.

        Now that's some funny shit right there.

        PS- fix your sig; "balloo" isn't a word, even in Texas. Maybe you could Bing it for the correct spelling!

    • If someone actually said that to me in real life I'd laugh in their face, then I'd make a note to never have anything to do with them again.

      I bing songs then squirt them to my zune.

  • Bullshit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Bing became what it is because it is the default page for every new Windows user profile on the planet. This combined with the fact that most goobers are incapable of changing their default start page(Fuck you for trying the same Firefox) results in billions of people using Bing.

    That said; Bing is still fucking awful and every bit the technical laughing stock. That Microsoft is able to get away with this fraud is such a sad reality. It is not a testament to Bing's "superiority".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, billions of flies love crap. Must be a great product!

    • In the old days when google supported a whole search language that could be used to narrow results in numerous ways, there was a legit technical argument.

      As a person who stopped using most MS products (other than keyboards) in the 90s, and who still sometimes spells their OS as Windoze, even I can't see what the "technical" difference is these days. If I would change my default it would merely be because it is my habit to reject MS, not for technical reasons, even if I was rejecting them for technical reaso

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      You mean it doesn't have anything to do with google curating results, and ignoring boolean searches? Who knew.

  • Well when you don't block porn your like your competitors people will use you.

    • If you want to turn off the google porn filter, just stop being so damned Victorian about your search terms.

      If you add "naked" or similar words to the search terms it turns the secret filter off.

  • As is all MS tech, at least to people with a clue.

  • Oh, sorry Dave, that's COMPLETELY incorrect, but we have a lovely Parting Gift...
  • Did Microsoft's marketing people write this or did they outsource the task?

  • Bing works fine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Brett Buck ( 811747 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @02:20PM (#58691770)

    I probably despise microsoft products as much as anyone, but Bing works fine for me. Google changed some stuff about how the filtering works about 5-6 years ago, Bing left it alone, and I find it far easier to use.

          An earlier post discussed porn - one of the things I couldn't do effectively with Google (without digging into it) was prevent every damn innocent search from plastering my screen with smut pictures. Sure, it taught me the true extent of Rule 34, but frankly, while I admit to being both old and old-fashioned, but I actually wanted to use it for something productive instead. Bing makes that easy to set up, Google doesn't, otherwise it gives the same results.

    • Re:Bing works fine (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Saturday June 01, 2019 @02:43PM (#58691858) Journal

      Google changed some stuff about how the filtering works about 5-6 years ago, Bing left it alone

      Bing(o)

      It also didn't help Google when they got caught biasing their search results politically, against the leanings of about half the population of the US. While that didn't lead to an organized move to another search engine, a lot of individuals started looking for alternatives.

      Switching brands:
        1. Realize that an alternative might be better.
        2. Try some alternatives.
        3. Find one you like better (maybe not for the original reason(s)).
        4. Switch.
        5. PROFIT:
              5a. For the new brand.
              5b. For you - in the form of increased satisfaction and quality of life, even if more money in your pocket isn't part of the package.

      • It also didn't help Google when they got caught biasing their search results politically, against the leanings of about half the population of the US. While that didn't lead to an organized move to another search engine, a lot of individuals started looking for alternatives.

              That, too, but I assume that with essentially all internet platforms, Slashdot very much included.

    • Nearly every day google returns search results that are less and less relevant. It outright ignores search words and brings you the most common results. You have to put quotes around nearly every word or phrase and even then the results are sometimes kind of related but definitely not what I wanted.

    • I did a porn search in Bing and the top hit was irs.gov.

      It deserved no further attention from me after that.

  • ... the Bing web crawler obeyed robots.txt instructions. When I submitted a problem report on it, I was told that it was a "known issue." A known issue that still has not been fixed.

    • Focus on known workarounds, they're more effective than known issues.

      • }}} Focus on known workarounds {{{ --- Have any suggestions or pointers?

        • Start with taking personal responsibility. That's the first step for fixing your computer instead of whining about it. It even works on servers.

          Next, after having accepted that it doesn't work because you didn't configure it in the way you need to to get the results you want, now rephrase the problem correctly so you're identifying the specific feature that you don't get to use because it isn't portable. When something doesn't support the feature you wanted, don't say "waaa doesn't work at all" instead you

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by q4Fry ( 1322209 )

            He literally means that robots.txt instructions are ignored by Bing. It's not a matter of "what is the right invocation," it's that they promise to de-index disallowed urls but do not do so. They also promise to de-index 404ed urls but that doesn't work either.

            • Exactly! You're pointing at "robots.txt" and then it turns out, no, it just doesn't use it in exactly the narrow way that you want. These are not the same complaint.

              You're conflating keeping the results in their search database with a directive that tells them not to crawl it again. Index in that case is a verb that talks about accessing the URL and searching it for additional URLs to crawl. That's the sort of behavior that robot.txt seeks to control.

              The same words mean different things in different places,

  • but you can go a long way when you've got a monopoly and little to no anti-trust regulation. Still a joke though [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Are you kidding? They're like the best porn search ever! Turn off safe search and bing won't hesitate to pop up all manner of orifices the like of which has not been seen on the internet since the goatse.cx craze of the '90's. If you're still searching for porn on Google, give Bing a try, you're sure to be impressed!

    • "How did Bing go from a joke to generating nearly three times the advertising revenue of Twitter?"

      Simple. Bing is still a joke, like you said, and so is Twitter.

  • from the inside of Bing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Champaklal ( 3411751 ) <spam.me.bich@out ... minus physicist> on Saturday June 01, 2019 @02:28PM (#58691804)
    Bing came during the dark phase of MS- during the rule of SteveB. Steve put a culture in MS which was very toxic and obnoxious. Stack ranking had made people self centric, and they we not willing to help their peers, often obfuscated the code, and people went to the extreme of code stealing of others, and making it run under their names. Buttering the managers was common, and "I against you, us against them, and so on" was the mantra.

    Bing had no answer to "why choose Bing over Google". During the all hands, this question was asked several times, but never answered satisfactorily by any one. DuckDuckGo figured out the answer- because they redefined user privacy. Bing had no such philosophy because they were blatantly copying Google.

    In Bing, people from Yahoo India had come, with their stale ideas and the environment was completely political inside. Instead of writing code, and solving the issue of query share gain in a logical and original way, people generally were asking- "Look what does G show on SERP. Let's try and copy the result". As soon as a new uncharted territory (aka sub-vertical of queries) was found, the whole team would pounce upon it and try to hijack the project.

    Even, some women (not all) were promoted because they had illicit affair with their program managers, and that was evident. Often, they would be called inside the chamber, and they would sit beneath the desk, and would be presenting the demo to him. These type of women were promoted on techniques which were shipped, and rolled back within 6 months because the issue ceased to exist, and some other team changed their web pages to more Bing-friendly way.

    It was this era which saw exodus of brainy people, who did not want toxicity in their lives. In words of an ex- Principal engineer, "I was not able to make a dent in MS, but in the new company, whatever I do, I see a direct impact happening". The new company he joined was also in the league of giants.

    The technology part was not matured inside Bing to be of any use then. The expressive power of language inside Bing was not sufficient enough to tell the ranking algorithm about the exceptions to be considered. As a result, Bing ranker would not work well on a generic playing field like internet.

    Another issue that plagued the Bing team was query share distribution. we are talking which type of query has what percentage. Given that Bing used to get only 25% of the traffic volume of Google, the query share used to unrealistic, and most common question used to be- "as per our queries, what is the query share gain?" even though common sense told that queries of particular type should be prevalent.

    Next issue was using unnecessary jargon to obfuscate the failures in training various rankers, or finding the query share. The jargon would usually make the talk convoluted, and cumbersome, and the main crux would be lost. Often, the discussions wold stretch hours, with almost no concrete plan to resolve the issue, but instead, tentative exploratory plans, which usually led nowhere.

    managers had no clue about machine learning or artificial intelligence. they wanted a series of if-else statements, if that's what took to bring out results in a month's time. they had no time to train a model, test its scores on different metrics, and then ship. they just wanted quick outcomes, which seldom happens in the realm of AI / ML. There were no Ph.Ds initially in the engineering team, neither were any architects or Individual contributors giving design to teams to work upon. People were on their own.

    Due to above scenario, usually people who got promoted were either proved loyalists, or the politicking ones. In any case, meritocracy was tossed out of window.

    such a culture reflected the nature of top management, which was being copied by their juniors.

    With Satya Nadella at helm, stack ranking was abolished for good, and the culture of trust was reinforced. People were pushed now to show results and were held accountable irrespective of the jargon they used, or the hype they created around themselves. However, Bing took too long to come in profit, and that too, too little.
  • So Microsoft managed to improve the market share of Bing by making it the default in Windows...so it's Internet Explorer all over again.
    Of course, nowadays the PC is no longer the primary computing device and thus this time the trick has had a more limited impact. This in turn, is what will probably save them from being accused of antitrust.

  • The best I can say about Microsoft's attempt at making a search engine is that at least it's not as bad as Google's attempt at making a desktop operating system.

    • Tell that to my mother-in-law, who hasn't had any problems with tech support scams since we replaced her laptop with a chrome box. There are tools for everything, and ChromeOS has a place.

    • ChromeOS works great for its intended purpose. Of course it's not going to be the OS of Linux neckbeards but for the general public who use social media and maybe Youtube it works amazingly well. It also works great for students instead of iPads. You can buy three Chrome Books for the price of a single iPad and they come with a full keyboard and long battery life. When was ChomeOS ever marketed as "a desktop operating system"?

  • Their search doesn't return relevant results half the time. Sometimes it even completely ignores the keywords you plus (+), and returns only results for keywords you didn't. It gets worse every year.

  • " But it's more revenue brought in by either Microsoft's LinkedIn professional network or the company's line of Surface computers and other hardware"

  • What are we comparing this to? The problem with these giant companies squeezing out all of the competition is that we end up having to settle for mediocre products and services.

  • Bing gives me better search results than Google for many fields like IT and Computer Science. I find it gives me an edge in problem-solving.

    Also, with a daily casual use of Bing usually earns enough points for another free year of Xbox Live and Microsoft Store discounts.

  • Microsoft and Yahoo fully cooperate with the Chinese government to have their search engines available unblocked in China, fully censored, according to the wishes of the current Mao-wannabe. Somehow it is OK for these jerks to do it, but not Google? We have even allowed the M$ monopoly to force their "spyware as an operating system" onto the entire world...

  • IIRC I saw them mentioned at the bottom of a search page as having done some of the work.
  • My memory is Microsoft's attempt to "portal" the web with its .net scheme was disrupted by Google search that emphasized non-sponsored and sponsored links and followed up with email services offering greater "free" storage space. The "white space" sea change with Google, Wikipedia, and Craig's List (a focus on function) seemed to be a shift away from the crowded ad-space of AOL. By the time YouTube and FaceBook were emerging (still two-years prior to Jobs' realization of a finger-friendly UI in the palm of

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