What Is Bing? - Comments Page 1

I normally access my Hotmail account through Mozilla but this past weekend I noticed that Internet Explorer was acting wacky. The blue band at the top of the page would start flashing and nothing would work. I noticed the words Bing Development flashing in the URL line for just a second or two and thought I was being hacked. Nice of them to forewarn folks.

Re: tight integration, see "Microsoft's Bing playing fast and loose with fair use?" on ZDNet -- http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howell/?p=245

Right off the git... Go to Bing and do a search on Google. Now try Yahoo. Now type in Bing. .... a bit different. Not even subtle.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Actually, I think those results are fabulous. Bing has realized that most people who type Google or Yahoo into a search engine are not looking for information about those keywords -- they want to go there and search.

I typed "FR-3111" into Bing, Google and Yahoo with 131, about 69,800 and 1,160,000 results respectively. The item I was looking for, a Mitsuba FR-3111 turn-signal flasher for my motorcycle received 383, about 100, and 10 hits each when adding the word "mitsuba" to the search.

They each certainly seem to be different.

If Bing can filter out those bogus sites that list ebay listings, or just "lists", I might be inclined to switch from Yahoo.

Haven't you heard? Bing stands for "But It's Not Google!"

Found out about Bing from an article which also mentiouned yaub.com, another recently arrived search engine. Been trying both in parallel since then.

Results in "Bing" (another sad attempt at a lively memorable name) are essentially the same as in msb/live search, and other otherly branded MS offerings. Not impressive. Excessive integration and stickiness and usual lack of concern for user privacy are not surprising.

"New" features unremarkable in the face of search engines like clusty (formerly vivisimo), or kartoo or even ujiko. (Not to mention the newest from google and the largely untapped, undocumented abilities of yahoo search, derived from inktomi.)

But back to the beginning: Yaub seems to take privacy seriously, has a surprisingly fast "real-time" results set, culling seemingly within minutes from twitter and the like, and allows to search traditional internet web and news sites, PDFs and PPTs, blogs, images, social networks and more with two clicks -plus the query itself, of course.

Worth a visit.

You like Bing, good. You do not like Bing and want it removed from your system? HAH! Not gonna happen. MS learned a lot from it's locked in IE trick, Bing is a permanent addition to IE whether you want it or not.

Jerry, Bing just replaced Live.com. If you don't want it, can't you just remove Bing from the search provider list? Click the down arrow next to the magnifying glass (in the upper right of IE), and select Manage Search Providers. Select your preferred search provider and click the "Set as default" button. Now you can leave Bing there for when you want it, or select Bing and click the "Remove" button. Nothing is locked, dude.

And the idiocy of IE being "locked" is mind-numbing. You can choose whatever browser you want and make that your default. You can even remove IE from your system so that you can't browse the internet with it at all. However, since MS uses the mshtml control for much of its user interaction, that (and its supporting code) must remain. It's just another dll MS includes in Windows. That's it.

And no, I'm not a MS believer. But I am a coder, and it's much easier to deliver a user interface using html, so I can't blame MS for making this decision at all.

Nothing forces you to use Windows (except maybe your place of work), or IE, or Bing. I use Firefox and Google on Windows, and I'm perfectly happy with all of them.

My first Bing search: To test it out I typed in the name of the city where I live. Top result the town courhouse. What is their page rank criteria?

I simply do not like Bing and want to remove it! Are you saying that Microsoft does not allow the option of removing it? That's just not right on several levels!!! Doesn't it also promote annoying ad pop-ups?

EDITOR'S NOTE: No, I'm not saying you cannot remove it. Bing is just a website, so close your browser and it's gone. Where did you hear that Bing was promoting popups??