[lucb1e]

The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well.

At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).

For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question.

Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected.

I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for.

Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.

[bambax]

> At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).

Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing.

Still, Google is miles ahead of the competition.

Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

On Bing there is a first line of 4 videos, none of them related to the movie "Up" in any way. The second link is to Up on Imdb (good). The 3rd link is to a crazy religious fanatic site page titled "Disney PIXAR's, 'Up' - The Sugarcoating of Pedophilia!" (WTF??!? - but at least related to the movie). The 4th link is again to a youtube video with no connection to the movie.

On Google, the first 8 links are to the movie. There is a line of images, all from the movie / movie poster. There's a list of 4 questions "People also ask" that shows questions about the movie ("How many balloons would it take to lift a house?"). To be fair, the crazy Baptist site does show up on Google too (God has good SEO!), but way down below the fold.

Anyway, my point is, when answering the question, Google is certain you're looking for information about Up, and tries to give it to you.

Bing seems to have doubts and tries to guess if maybe you're looking for a funny video of a man in the subway wearing a balloon hat (??!? it's not a "movie"!!) or the hit song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 (not a "movie" either!)

Bing tries hard, but is obviously more than a little clueless.

[JdeBP]

> Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

Your experiment's results are not repeatable. When I do that here:

* Bing gives me 8 pages about Up (including that spoof site), one about Danny Deckchair, and a page about a magician who re-creates old movies with balloons.

* Google gives me 13 pages about Up (also including that spoof site), a book of best movie scenes on its page for The Third Man, and an article from The Rotarian from 1948.

Of course, some knowledge of how these things work teaches that this is a terrible methodology, given that it does not account for the fact that both Bing and Google tailor their search results to the searcher. One should at the very minimum log out of one's Google and Bing accounts, which you made no mention of doing.

[dTal]

>crazy religious fanatic site

FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very well known spoof site.

[bambax]

Oh, thank you, I didn't know that. It seems real enough.

[alanh]

And a canonical example of Poe’s Law in action.

[bambax]

Yes. But the fact that it's a parody of fundamentalist Christianity makes it a very bad result, because it's a comment on religion (or fanaticism, or Internet culture, or what have you) and not about the movie itself.

A perfect search engine would not return this on the first page of results about the movie, because it's not about the movie.

[eps]

> The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible... But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well.

That's a spot-on description of Altavista :)