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by spacemanspiff01 529 days ago
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.
1 comments

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

Far less than the time saved had they received Google's results instead of Bing's inferior ones.
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).
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.
DDG uses Bing behind the scenes.
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

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.

You've completely overlooked the possibility of a search engine without ads. That's what I use.
> 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Google no longer provides anything useful, to the extent they were famous for.
Bing results are inferior, but Google sure as hell isn't superior.