back to article Google flings Bing into search engine bin

A worrying trend for Microsoft's search engine was revealed last Friday: Bing's market share remained flat over the last two months while Google clawed back web surfers. According to ComScore, Bing is struggling to add users – despite Microsoft's expensive efforts to make the search engine a serious contender against the …

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  1. Citizen Kaned

    and...

    M$ are being sneaky too: default UK install of IE9 now means you cannot select google as a search engine (you can in USA, but in the UK its not in the list!). you have to set locale to USA or find the old link. its a pain in the arse figuring this out!

    1. CommanderJameson

      You sure?

      I went here from the search bar (dropped the menu down, clicked "Add"):

      http://www.iegallery.com/gb/addons/?feature=searchproviders

      Installed the "Google" search provider, and ticked the box that says "Make this my default search provider", and hey presto, bob's your viola.

      It's not effortless, but it's not "cannot", either.

      1. Citizen Kaned

        really?

        must have changed. last week i tried and it was still like this. its odd as if you change to USA it was there but in UK the only google things were accelerators. if you google search there are some workarounds so it must have been an issue for others too...

    2. Andy Jones
      Meh

      Actually ...

      Just change the GB to EN in the address string and you can suddenly find it.

      Bloody annoying but what do you expect from Microsoft.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      M$ Search

      "default UK install of IE9 now means you cannot select google as a search engine"

      Worked fine on my UK install of IE9.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microsoft

    ...when will they learn that apart from companies who already use Winblows and are too scared to change, no-one wants their crappy products. Search engines included!

    1. Wade Burchette
      FAIL

      (no title)

      Those who do everything do nothing well. I tried using Bing when its name was first changed from Live search. But I found it couldn't find water in the middle of the ocean. I had more success searching Microsoft's website using Google than Bing! Microsoft should stick to what they do best.

      However, I disagree with you regarding "Winblows". Apparently you've never used Windows 7. And also, apparently you've never used Office. Those products are anything but crappy, and many people want to use them. Only people who cannot afford Office or fanboys want to use the alternatives to Office.

      The core Microsoft products, the ones that have been around a long time such as Windows, Office, and SQL Server, are really good. The problem with Microsoft is they want to branch out too much.

      1. eulampios

        Win7 might be not bad, why bother if there is GNU/Linux though?

        Apparently, you never used GNU/Linux or FreeBSD. Can you get a live media with (a free????) Win[1-7] like the one with,say, Ubuntu, where you, in particular, have a persistent file system, LibreOffice, PostgreSQL Server and tools 8.4 (or MySQL, or both) and emacs. You must've never used emacs and (La)TeX, I gather. AMOF, GNU Emacs substitutes several office suites .

        1. BongoJoe

          Free != Good

          I keep seeing these comments about the free alternatives to MS Office.

          I still haven't seen an OpenOffice, or similar, which can handle xml feeds decently nor anything with a good COM interface or a good programming back-end.

          If I had to dump Excel for one of these freetard alternatives then I would have to spend months converting everything into CSV files and then writing my own front-end app. And then I would perhaps end up using Microsoft's .Net development packages anyway.

          1. eulampios

            what if free is better?

            I bet I can handle your xml feeds with awk, sed and perl much more efficiently than your Excel and .Net together. BTW, gnumeric, a free and open alternative of it, has more data and statistics capabilities than overpriced and locked up Excel. My Emacs (+LaTeX) with no macro-viruses can get better documents than Word is ever capable of. Emacs (or vim) with shell utils can substitute all of .Net

            It is your problem of locking yourself down to MS products and formats.

            Yes, "free" != good, e.g., flasplayer. It is "free" as in beer, it is infamously locked up though, hence it is non-free. Mplayer, vlc, totem beats it and any other close-tard in everything and everywhere.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @ Wade Burchette

        Christ, what planet are you living on ?

        I make my living, a good one generally, from these 'products', and I'll repeat what someone else said to me 'BG & his company have held back innovation in the computer business by at least 20 years'.

        I have said on many an occasion, that Windows, and associated software, is all fluff & no substance, it looks great (well it used to until Vista & W7 & Server 2008), but if you blow on it too hard, it falls to pieces.

        From the very start, the company's moto was Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and if we can't do that, then simply steal the ideas.

        Unforunately for us, those people tasked with the implementation of said stolen ideas didn't have clue one

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Quite Simply.

    Shit sinks....

    Bing is totally rubbish usually, and outside the US it's even worse, with no real concept of regional variations in search results.

    I search on Bing, I get useless US links, I search on Google and the right stuff is almost always on the first page of results, and usually top 3...

  4. Ru
    FAIL

    They're all rubbish

    When someone can make a search engine that, upon being asked for pages containing reviews of product X, actually return pages containing reviews of product X instead of a bunch of useless price comparison sites and a load of even more useless 'be the first to review this product!' pages, then everyone will sit up and take notice.

    For now, it'll just be a battle of the mediocre. Bing apparently can't do time-based search filtering, and Google have dropped support for +keyword without providing a sensible alternative (and no, "quotes" do not perform the same role!). At least we're not yet back to the level of the bad old days of the 90s. Yet.

    1. Code Monkey

      +1

      The time is nigh for some other search engine to do what the young Google did (i.e. get search right) but MS is not the company to do it.

      Google shunned all the portal crap and focussed on good search results. While today's Google is nowhere near the crapness of the search engines it replaced, can anyone remember when they last added anything that made search better?

      1. David 9

        I think that's the point

        Google continuously upgrade their products, making big changes all but imperceptible unless you actually used a version of their search from 1, 3, 5 & 8 years ago. Google nowadays is far better than it was back then, but looks almost exactly the same.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        As I do a lot of SEO, and rely heavily on Google for my business to succeed, yes - Google is always changing the search algorithm to get good quality sites at the top.

        With the Panda update, and the new social algorithm which is being implemented into Google which will affect 35% of all new searches, Google are making search better continuously.

        You should perhaps take a few minutes to learn about the Google algorithm, and stay up to date with it, before making false comments about it.

        1. Woodgar

          "As I do a lot of SEO, and rely heavily on Google for my business to succeed"

          You, sir, are part of the problem, not the solution.

    2. Rustybucket

      Searching for reviews...

      I find IXQuick to be much better at this.

      An anonymous, https engine that doesn't use instant search or that stupid, STUPID all-in-one image search results page. Oh and it's a proxy as well

      YMMV of course ;)

  5. John Armstrong-Millar

    kinda obvious

    When Bong came along I thought "Great" at last an option to using Google. Sadly though,IMHO it simply under performs and I have since stopped using it. It appears I'm not alone.

  6. Joel Mansford
    Stop

    Bing needs to improve

    I leave a couple of my browsers defaulted to Bing but quite often simply don't see the search results I expect.

    So then I go to the URL, change the bing to google (leaving all the parameters in place), hit enter and find loads more, relevant hits.

    Bing's image search is very good but in every other aspect unfortunately I have to see it's inferior to Google.

    We need it to improve otherwise there'll be no competition in the search engine space...

  7. Herer

    verb fail

    Using Google you can have Googled for stuff, which is cute, people know what this means.

    Say that you've Binged though and it sounds like you like spending the nights in Cardiff town centre having fights in front of CCTV cameras.

    Still, before that it was Windows Live Search, which wasn't catchy but then had a name which matched the quality of the search, ie, crap.

  8. vilemeister
    Megaphone

    Seriously El Reg, when is hat joke going to get boring?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      why-

      when! commentards! stop! commenting! on! it!

      - of course

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I bet

      you use Fedora.

      Anyway, as! for! hat! particular! joke! I think a time comes when they should be honest, search out some (male) Yahoo! yahoo and just kick his balls into his solar plexus.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @They're all rubbish

    What is worse, if a search for a review does actually start to turn up reviews you often find most of them are the identical review being reposted by numerous blogs trying to look as if they are providing the actual reviews.

  10. schotness

    metacrawler

    metacrawler

  11. Tom 35

    Bing's market share remained flat over the last two months

    They have all the people who will not bother to change the default after installing an IE/OS upgrade. I don't think they will get anyone to actually choose to use bing.

  12. M Gale

    So what you're saying...

    ...is that despite being the default search engine for the default web browser on the default operating system of near enough every personal computer sold in the world, Microsoft still can't get people Binging.

    My faith in humanity, whilst not restored, is experiencing a modest rise.

  13. fishman

    Gave up on Bing

    I tried Bing, but I kept on having to rerun the searches using Google when I wasn't having enough success.

  14. MJI Silver badge

    Such a silly name

    Enough to put me off using it.

  15. raving angry loony

    tried

    I tried Bing. If it actually showed links to the information I've searched for, rather than what some advertising wank in Redmond thinks I should be searching for, I'd use it. Until then, pffft, useless.

  16. DutchP

    I wouldn't know

    Never tried Bing, not likely to either.

    I agree with earlier posts that Google needs some competition, but that doesn't have to mean Bing.

    What we need are privacy-respecting search engines such as ixquick, startpage.com (powered by ixquick) and duckduckgo.com to get a larger audience.

    Unfortunately, most folks don't seem to give a rat's ass about their privacy.

    I try to avoid using google as much as possible.

  17. Steven Roper

    The reason I still use Google

    is because of the iGoogle web page gadgets. My iGoogle home page has, on three tabs: a dictionary/thesaurus, currency converter, metric <-> imperial converter, world sunlight map, ISS/Hubble position map, torrent search, weather gadget, street map gadget centred on my home, Wikipedia search, world time clocks for 9 cities, several webcams in my home city so I can see what the conditions are like in town before going there, and a number of news gadgets (why don't you have an iGoogle gadget El Reg?)

    Unless Bing or Yahoo can provide that kind of customisable functionality, I'm not even remotely interested. I shouldn't need to go scouting around the web to find out the weather, time, currency, unit conversions and other stuff that I can find out from a convenient gadget on my home page.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Google Portal / iGoogle

      Its more than a little ironic that Google became popular and successful because it moved away from the portal crap that 99% of the interweb had turned into, but it still couldnt help itself and built that monstrosity that is iGoogle.

      There are still more portal sites (all very customisable) than nature should tolerate - not just google - and nearly all of them allow you to use RSS feeds as "content,"

      Personally, I think they are an abomination that should be hunted to extinction but YMMV.

      1. Steven Roper

        Fair enough

        Portal pages like iGoogle aren't for everybody. But I'm curious to know: what do you do if you want to know the weather forecast, the time in New York, or how many $US the pound is worth today?

        1. Steve Knox

          Well, to be honest...

          I personally find my local paper to be the best for the weather forecast, I look at my watch for the time in New York*, and I don't have any need to convert currency. For other, similar, requests that actually are best answered by a web page, I find a site suited for the particular request I have. It's not that difficult. I generally find portal sites to be more of a bother than a quick search.

          *even if you don't live in the same time zone (or have one of those multi-time-zone watches), it's basic arithmetic.

        2. Chemist

          "But I'm curious to know..."

          Bookmarks

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bing's only hope is

    That Window's Phone takes off so they can lock people into using Bing.

    I just checked God's list of pending miracles and Window Phone taking off is it not even in the top 100.

    Sorry Bing - your *ucked - well not really sorry,.

    1. gerryg
      Facepalm

      mind your language

      it's "you're" not "your" and f not *

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Numbers

    Crap or not (and it is but then Google is no better than it was 10 years ago), is a 0.3% variation over a month really significant enough to make any comment?

    Are they that accurate with their figures?

  20. Nick L

    I've tried to bing, I really have...

    I've tried to give bing a fair chance, I really have. I keep using it for searches particularly at work, but...

    it just doesn't work remotely as well as google. Even, and this is what galls me most, when searching for stuff related to Microsoft. For example, search for the upcoming version of SharePoint, SharePoint 15, on bing and you get precisely nothing about SP15. Do so on google and you get useful results.

    Try 'microsoft portal gold competency' (no quotes)... Bing returns 'value of earning a competency' and 'microsoft virtualisation' in the top 2 slots. Google gives you 'Earn the microsoft gold portals and collaboration competency', and in second place 'microsoft portals and collaboration competency' information page.

    Google knows you're probably interested in either earning it, or finding out what it's about. Bing tells you why you might want to earn one - which you already know if you're seaching for it, and I cannot think of who that is useful for - and tells you all about virtualisation.

    Sorry Bing. I've tried to love you, I really have, but it's just not working. Perhaps it's me, not you...

    But really, i think it's you.

  21. Tim #3

    Anyoen else using duckduckgo ? It's growing on me, particularly as it seems to return less shopping type stuff than google. Never could see the point of Bing.

  22. John Styles

    I know I will be mocked

    But I quite like the Bing front page with its different image and the links at the bottom.

    As many others have said the search engines are all gamed to the point of unusability in a number of areas.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Did my part

    'Fixed' a guy's computer (installed some software for him), set his default search from Bing to Google. Ha ha

    1. Brian 64
      FAIL

      Great. I hope it was Bing that he used to find you ... so he'll never make that mistake twice.

  24. Nigel 11
    Coat

    The name's prerry iffy as well

    Bing. Midway between a bong and a bang.

    1. Mediocrates
      Coat

      At least it's not a bung.

    2. M Gale

      And comes before a Bung...

      ...unfortunately.

  25. Turtle

    Possible silver lining for Microsoft.

    "Google may have seen a temporary blip in its search prowess online with the arrival of Bing, but its dominance is on the march again. Which is, of course, bad news for Microsoft."

    It's not necessarily bad news for Microsoft if the DoJ for example decides that Google is a monopoly that needs to be restrained. And that would seem to be far from impossible.

  26. Andus McCoatover
    Windows

    Bing...

    ...Is just 'wankware'.

    Couldn't even find me a decent pr0n site.

    Google had no problem, however, which is why I'm typing this with my left hand...

    1. Turtle

      Correct me if I am wrong. . .

      "Bing...Is just 'wankware'. Couldn't even find me a decent pr0n site. Google had no problem, however, which is why I'm typing this with my left hand..."

      Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't that make *Google* the "wankware"?

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bing - it's all about copying.

    They copied the name from Ryanair ( who in turn copied the app from SouthWest )

    http://www.gadling.com/2007/05/11/bing-ding-ryanairs-obvious-southwest-rip-off-even-more-obvious/

    They copy their results from Google

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/google_accuses_microsoft_of_copying_its_search_results/

    and comes from a company who copied their core product from Apple ( who in turn copied it from Xerox ).

    Why would anyone want to go for a copy when they can go to Google and get the genuine article?

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Keep it old skool...

    I still use Hotbot for all my search!

  29. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

    But Its Not Google

    Bummer of an acronym there.

  30. 2cent

    Civil Behaviour vs "Hey, Look at me, look at me !!!"

    I don't know, maybe it's just me.

    Every time I have to use Bing via Verizon on my cell phone, I feel like I'm being prodded with a stick.

    However, when I use Google I feel as though I'm getting a service that I'm looking for.

  31. mhenriday
    Boffin

    That «Bing is struggling to add users»

    certainly does seem to be correct, but if StatCounter's statistics (http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-daily-20080701-20111115) are to be believed, the struggle level for both Yahoo and Bing is significantly lower than that claimed by ComScore - each around 10 % of the US search-engine market, while Google sails on at just under 80 %. Worldwide, Google enjoys a market share of over 90 %, while Yahoo and Bing share the leftovers more or less equally between them, as befits brothers in arms....

    Henri

  32. David1

    Devil's Advocate

    Much as I detest Mr Gates and all his works, I have found that Bing maps are much better than Google maps. (Of course this was accomplished by buying Multimaps.)

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