Microsoft's Lost $5.5 Billion On Bing (So Far)

[Jandau]

What's Bing?

Seriously though, I remeber seeing an ad for some kind of search engine by MS and I remember thinking how incredibly overdesigned and cluttered it seemed. I don't want pretty backgrounds and whatnot when I'm opening my search engine. I want a plain page with a box to enter my query.

Now, while writing this post I went and checked it out. At first glance, it's Google but with a pretty picture in the background. So why exactly would I want to stop using Google and switch to Bing?

 

[Wintermoot]

MS should stick with OS,s and let stuff like social networking get done by the younger generation.
their OS,s are top-of-the-line (except for Win8 but it,s part of their pattern).
just abandon it and move onto Win9 or work on ironing out Win8.

 

[gphjr14]

Be nice if Bing would just ***k off. I annoys me to no end when I download a program or addon to my browser and it adds a stupid bing toolbar. Not to mention they already got caught earlier in the year steeling results from google.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

google.com/ncr.

That's all I've ever searched on Bing, because I was in China and it was the default search engine.

Bing does nothing functionally that Google doesn't do better, all around second-option.

 

[Shameless]

I don't mind Bing honestly, I use it's image search when I can't find what I am looking for in Google.

 

[Sansha]

This reminds me of 'Games for Windows Live', the buggiest online game system ever, to try to compete with Steam.

They don't even touch it now, and would rather pretend it never happened. Pity I still need it to play fucking Fallout3.

 

[snfonseka]

Bing? What the heck is Bing?

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

My response to that news? [http://tf2wiki.net/w/images/c/cd/Spy_laughlong01.wav]

 

[J3llo]

Big surprise, seriously who thought bing was a good idea when google practically owns the Internet.

 

[De Ronneman]

I actually used Bing today.

On accident. The PC's at my school have that toolbar, and I automatically assumed they were Google bars, since noone uses that Bing bar...

 

[omega 616]

Ask anybody on the planet to use a search engine on the net and I would say 90% would say google all day long. I actually doubt many people know there are other search engines on the net ... google owns searching for shit!

Even a super search engine like dogpile, who uses google bows down to google.

When will MS realize and stop trying to monopolize everything? They have lost so much money trying to do it!

 

[Smooth Operator]

It still amazes me that Microsoft is the king of the software industry, a giant with an enormous wealth of resources at its disposal, and yet it simply cannot compete with the vision of smaller, younger companies.

Everything that Microsoft does these days has been done first, and better. That's not to say that it couldn't pull it off; not at all. Microsoft has the talent, or at least the money to get the talent, to make some really incredible stuff, and yet they keep fucking up, and not doing anything right. XP is still, unfortunately, the best OS they've put out so far, Vista being awful and Windows 7 nothing special. They cannot even manage to keep releasing new *improved* OS's time after time, let alone innovate or drive the industry forward. It would be incredible to see a competent Microsoft once more, but I really don't see that happening, for the time being, at least.

They have gone massively corporate, they can't innovate anymore because investors expect them to only print their current array of sure-sale products.
So they just assimilate, any time you hear of a shinny new MS "innovation" you can bet your ass they bought it with a new company.

Problem with that is most people with good prospects wont sell out so all MS gets are second rate leftovers that don't quite cut it.

 

[Project_Xii]

Amusingly this is the first time I've ever heard of Bing. Looking at it now, it looks exactly like Google, just with a side bar. Like Google+ and Facebook, it makes you wonder why people would switch over to some other service when the one they're using does the job fine.

 

[deus-ex-machina]

I don't know. Maybe I'm just used to Google, but I can always find what I want much more efficiently searching the same words on Google than on Bing. A lot of places where I work - being a pharmacist, that would mostly be pharmacies - have Bing in the toolbar and I'm not sure whether than is by choice or not but I constantly find myself going back to Google for research pages and information pages that aren't full of advertising or propaganda.

Google just seems to do a better job.

 

[Epona]

How dare Microsoft try to compete with the all-mighty Google! I prefer Google too but competition is good and who else is big enough to lose 5 and half Billion dollars to compete with Google?

 

[direkiller]

This is me on bing:

-search
-find irrelevant crap
-bing search for google
-use google instead

I wouldn't be surprised it the top search on Bing was "google".

I wonder how much of Bing's 7% share is down to how it is the default search on every device relating to microsoft?

oddly for a time when those intrusive bing search bars were around(the thing that turned most people off bing) the largest thing searched on bing was how to get rid of bing search bar

 

[TitanAtlas]

I kinda feel embarassed to realize just today that there's a search engine called Bing.... It seems i didn't miss that much though...

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

I just don't see it as having any advantage whatsoever. You're still searching with keywords: they're just stripping out the rest of the question. Why not search with the keywords directly instead of tricking people into thinking that phrasing it as a question actually does something?

It's training people to waste effort typing more than they need in order to get less accurate results (the stripping can't be perfect). It's not like it's really difficult to teach someone the concept of searching with keywords directly - there isn't some massive savings in effort by avoiding teaching people this and allowing them to use natural language syntax.

 

[flying_whimsy]

The search part of bing simply isn't as good as google, but the aerial photography used for their maps service fills the gap google left between satellites and street view.

I feel like Bing is built on a flawed understanding of how people actually use the internet, or rather, a willing ignorance of the fact that google has defined how people use the internet.

 

[Billska]

I don't find that surprising. They doomed themselves with the name.
Bing:
Because
It's
Not
Google