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by VyseofArcadia 531 days ago
Never quite understood the hate for Bing. I despise Microsoft, but Bing is fine. It's one of the least shit Microsoft products there is. It definitely wasn't competitive on release, but it's fine now.

To be fair I think this is a function of both Bing having gotten better and Google having gotten worse.

11 comments

Bing is ok. DDG is pretty much its anonymized version.
Initially it reeked of IE by association. But then internet communities realized it was better than google for porn. So now its OK in some circles at least.
Honestly, this is what I want bing's 'homepage' to look like and I usually configure it to be as close to that as I can. The default was/is a ton of news and other junk. I just want a search bar and maybe an identifier picture. It was one of the things I liked when google first came out. It was 'simple' as many of the other search engines from years ago had tons of 'helpful' things on the front page that I just did not want.
I always find it embarrassing when a colleague opens up a new tab while screen sharing and Bing / Edge starts spamming trashy news.

Given Microsoft is “soo enterprise” it’s always a source of amazement that Microsoft feel it’s acceptable to default to this kind of spammy behaviour.

It just goes to show how running businesses by engagement scores really is just a race to the bottom.

> starts spamming trashy news. Think I am on my 4th or 5th time going into the settings to turn it off too.

I think google may be starting to do something similar too. I think I got caught in an A/B test a week or so ago. Little bits of news popping on the landing page. Off to the settings to turn that off. Which then somehow messed up the settings on my phone as well.

Computers doing 'surprising things' makes users angry and feel like they do not have control.

That was back when everyone was trying to make a "portal" to compete with AOL. It seems like browsers are headed down the same path now with replacing the simple search box new tab page with the same stuff the portals had.
I've never used bing that much, but after google removed its cache feature last year, I found myself using bing a lot more often. A couple of weeks back I was so disappointed to find out that Microsoft had pulled the plug on bing's cache as well. I just can't grasp why anyone would think that removing the one feature that gave you edge over the competition was a good idea. AFAIK now the only search engine remaining with a cache is yandex.
I have a longtime dislike for Microsoft but google has become almost unusable recently with fake ai pages filling the results, and Bing seems to work better.
I stopped using DDG, which pulls results from Bing, because Bing fell very easily for SEO slop; yes, even worse than Google.

The most painful for me was a set of wikis filled with AI-generated nonsense about OCaml and some other niche languages, which completely shadowed genuine content on the first page of any search.

If I land on a Google page I search for Bing now. Colipot is included with Office and I'm signed in. Copilot is far more useful than Google search. I would use Bard (Gemini) but I don't have a work login for Google properties. Microsoft wins.
Moves like the one from the linked article is one contributor to the hate.
Google and bing suck about equally at search these days.
Honestly I feel like Bing has been the better search engine for 6 - 8 years at this point.
In my experience the search results on bing are a spam filled trash fire.