[ballenf]

I bet this is 100x+ more effective at keeping people on Bing than anything else MS has tried. Same idea as knock-off brands with labels and designs inspired by the name brand.

People may eventually realize they're not on Google, but probably only after being not displeased in Bing's results. If they have a bad experience, oh well, they were planning on using google anyway.

[stemlord]

Bing is a lot better than google for adult content. Bing actually has pretty neat image search tools

[kbelder]

I consider Bing better in some areas, and equivalent in most others. Their image search is definitely better. Text search is... well, not good, but not any worse than Google.

[spacemanspiff01]

Maybe I am cheap, but I have been using bing because of their rewards points stuff, at least then I get paid for my data.

[IncreasePosts]

I will help determine if you're cheap. How much money have you saved/made through the rewards points stuff?

[junar]

I perused the Bing rewards site [1]. It seems that you need 1,000 Bing searches to get a $5 Microsoft or Xbox gift card (3rd party gift cards seem more expensive). There are also daily caps on rewards from Bing searches.

[1] https://rewards.bing.com/welcome

[garciasn]

Far less than the time saved had they received Google's results instead of Bing's inferior ones.

[norman784]

Are Google results good? I stop using Google years ago because of the garbage results (a lot of spam sites that were just serving data crawled from Github and other sites).

[nine_k]

My primary search engine as of now is DDG, Their results are mostly fine (and powered partly by Bing). When their results are not good enough, I ask Google; often, but not always, it's better. For some other kinds of queries, Google fares notably worse than DDG, likely because SEO tricks are disproportionately directed against Google, and not always work against other search engines as effectively.

[DoctorOW]

DDG uses Bing behind the scenes.

[unsignedint]

I've had my issues with Google ever since they ran a series of ads pretending to be for Blender but actually linking to a scam site. (I’m not sure if it’s gotten better since then.) While I do occasionally come across questionable ads on Bing, they’re definitely much less frequent. For what it’s worth, I’ve switched to using Edge as my browser as well, largely because Google refuses to address one of the most frustrating issues with its external link profile behavior. Specifically, Google forces external links to open in the last-used profile, rather than letting you choose, whereas Edge allows you to customize this behavior.

On top of that, Bing’s deep search feature has proven to be genuinely useful

[miki123211]

If you use a search engine, you need an Ad Blocker.

Not because "privacy:", not because "tracking", but because malicious ads exist, and you'll click on one eventually.

This is even more true for less technical family members.

[norman784]

> Specifically, Google forces external links to open in the last-used profile, rather than letting you choose, whereas Edge allows you to customize this behavior.

This is a neat feature, I used browserosaurus for a similar behaviour, but also that means I have multiple browsers open, one basically for each profile.

[thaumasiotes]

See Dan Luu, "How Bad Are Search Results?"

https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

[Arnavion]

I wrote https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2020-12-05-ddg-vs-google/ in 2020. The tl;dr is that Bing's (DuckDuckGo's) results were garbage and Google was giving the correct answer within the first five results.

Running those same specific queries now, the Google results are as bad or worse than Bing's results at the time, and Bing now frequently gets the results that Google did at the time. But my everyday experience is still that Google gives generally better results than Bing / DDG.

[KTibow]

I've went through a few stints of using Bing. Eventually I end up starting all my queries with `@google`.

[philistine]

I don’t believe for one second that Google’s results are better. Their market share is so big that no one running SEO scams is looking at their Bing results. So that immediately makes the Bing results far more organic and sane.

[Barrin92]

>Their market share is so big that no one running SEO scams is looking at their Bing results

That's pretty unsound logic for two reasons. One is that it's not very likely that SEO optimization for different mainstream search engines requires any more effort than for one, secondly Bings ~5% market share is what, tens of millions of people still? If nobody games it you're leaving free money on the floor, and internet scammers are hyper competitive.

[Incipient]

I rarely have to search more than once or twice for a topic, and find the result in the top few links on bing.

But I'm mostly searching for tech stuff. Local content, or answering questions, google is better.

[pjmlp]

Google no longer provides anything useful, to the extent they were famous for.

[alt187]

Bing results are inferior, but Google sure as hell isn't superior.

[mlekoszek]

They're really using every tactic they can -- and for the life of me, I have no idea why. They've pushed so hard, for so long, to make Bing succeed -- even forcing it in the Start menu -- and it's still not owning the search space.

[gjsman-1000]

In my opinion, they'd be much more effective if they just killed the Bing brand, killed Bing rewards, killed the Bing newsfeeds, rebranded it to "Private Search" at privatesearch.com, and called it a day. Yes, people have memories shorter than a goldfish.

[autoexecbat]

Agreed that the Bing brand has to go, but I think they should use their normal naming schemes, something like "Microsoft Azure Cloud Search Pro 2025 SP1"

[foobiekr]

Honestly whatever the hell Google offers at this point has been disguising itself as google search for years. It sure as shit is not what people expect from google.

[thaumasiotes]

I had similar thoughts; my gut says that this is bad behavior by Microsoft, but that what Google has done to their own supposed product is bad enough to justify it.

[zb3]

Nothing can keep me on Bing unless the results improve. Or am I the only one who regularily gives Bing a try only to find out the results are irrelevant?

[amyames]

It just seems I’m doing the google -> bing -> yandex thing a lot now.

And then I don’t bother with many competitors because they’re all bing based anyway.

Way down the list sometimes I resort to Brave search. Not because it’s good. But in fact, because it’s so bad, it might be indexing something the others tried getting rid of for a good year or two after everyone else tried to memory hole it.

Which has helped me pull cached versions of something interesting “to me” that wasn’t interesting enough for someone else to have gotten with archive.today

Think the most recent one I went down the whole rabbit hole on was a tv show called “that’s my bush” from Comedy Central. I was willing to buy them but they were Unobtainium. I did end up finding the episodes on archive.org and on torrents, via yandex. Great example of something harmless and hilarious that Big Social and Big Search just HAS to protect my delicate sensibilities and my fragile mind from.

Just to underscore how stupid and petty some of this stuff has gotten. Even if it’s not outright censorship of (at best) tangentially “political” content (they had planned on lampooning whoever won, thinking Al Gore was going to be president, and it’s the same guys who did South Park so it’s culturally and historically interesting to some of us) it proves how increasingly irrelevant Google has become.

Google and Bing both hid their availability on archive.org from me and I would not have thought to look there. Meanwhile, first hit on Yandex.

[littlecranky67]

I use bing chat (ChatGPT something) cos it works without login. I have it on a shortcut search trigger in Firefox with temporary tab containers. Replaced more than 50% of my searches, I use Kagi for the rest.

[notahacker]

Honestly, I'm under the impression they've converged so much recently I can't be bothered to switch on my work machine, and I don't think this is because Bing is getting better.

I think there are a few areas where Google still has an advantage (if I search with a city name, Google will match results to the city my IP address is located on and not a smaller, less significant one in the United States) but I think their self promotion and AI Q&A bullshit in results is actually worse.

[zb3]

Perhaps something like LMArena but for search engines could help them understand what underperforms.. is there a tool where i could see results side by side? I never thought about that..

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I started a new job and the browser default was set to Edge. I never bothered to change it and defaulted to using Bing for search. TBH, I don't notice a difference in results.

[riiii]

That's not because Bing is good. It's because Google has been enshittified.

[permo-w]

yeah I also did this again recently. Google was getting too heavy-handed with their impossible captchas, so I switched to Bing for a while, once again thinking that it can't be as bad as I remembered. honestly it was okay for a while, but Bing - and every other alternative I've tried - still really struggles with any query where a vital part of the meaning is captured by the structure of the sentence rather than the keywords alone.