[greycol]

It might be a bit of a stretch but I wonder what standing someone has to sue when search results are noticeably worse and changed in this way.

e.g. I just searched "<my town name> emergency" in google and bing. Bing came up with a travel site and several news articles. Google came up with a map with the local emergency department as the highlighted pin and urgent care as subsequent pins.

Google's little blurbs are also very handy in this case with instructions popping up as the first result when I search snake bite treatment and seizure care. (Actually I went through a few more emergencies after that and was pleasantly suprised how good google was at turning up instructions for emergency care)

It wouldn't surprise me if the monetary pressure associated with medical care in the US and the deep pockets of microsoft made them a tempting target.

[falcolas]

> search results are noticeably worse

This is not an endorsement of this article's allegations, or even of of Bing. But.

DDG uses Bing as one of its primary sources of data, and IMO DDG results are better than Google's for me both professionally and personally today. Maybe DDG is doing some special sauce behind the scenes, or maybe they're blending results from multiple sources, but that quality of search means I'm not at a point where I can unilaterally dismiss Bing and promote Google. Google's search results have just slid backwards too much lately.

[greycol]

I don't disagree that Bing can give great results and is better than google in at least a few areas and use cases. So I probably painted with a broad brush in that subjective statement. I do think the point that the bing results (at least for my location) are objectively worse (considering why most would make such a search) compared to google when looking for emergency healthcare information.

Primarily I use duck duck even if I occasionally fall back to the !g command. But I think anyone who is able to change their default search engine in chrome could not then argue that microsoft changing the default impeded them from easily searching for information (which would be important in any legal action). So while ddg is a great search engine I don't think it needs to be considered in the thought experiment of reasons you could sue microsoft for this change.

[chithanh]

Can't confirm. I use DDG as default search provider and have to fall back to Google much more than I would like to.

Google is IME much better than Bing/DDG for local search results, and that has not changed a bit. Also, while DDG is indexing news websites and Wikipedia well enough, when it comes to more obscure wikis, article comments, or forum posts, the search results are often very incomplete.