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?
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.