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Has Bing become a serious alternative as a search engine now?

cormack12

Gold Member
Been using this lately to drive up the MS Rewards balance. It's not as horrendous as I remember. Don't get me wrong, I still have to bring up google at times to supplement Bing like in 30% of cases but I mean it used to be 85-90% of cases. There's still some nice QoL stuff on google I like and some test searches against relevance still see Google comes out on top on things like news from the last day and advanced searches but Bing might actually be getting there.
 

TrueLegend

Member
Google is more reliable but their stagnation is out on display for everyone. I use edge but I still don't use bing. It brings windows phone PTSD to me.
 
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Alx

Member
It's been my default search engine for years, I always get the thing I'm looking for among the first 3 results. I don't know what people expect from search engines nowadays, but since information is better organized in general (what you're looking for is rarely on some random html page hosted by an amateur, but on structured sites with keywords and all), I guess most of them do the job.
 

BigBooper

Member
I've been using Bing for probably two years. In many ways it responds more like the old directory keyword searchers like aol, lycos, or yahoo. You definitely have to be more robotic in your searches than Google, but it's rare that I encounter something I can't find. If I can't figure out exactly what to call what I'm searching for, I have to go to Google because they are much better at parsing diverse information.

Bing has better image search. 😘

The only thing that always annoys me about Bing is the search options are not always available for every type of search. You can't easily search for a banana within the last 30 days. I can't figure out when and why the search options are sometimes unavailable.
 
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Does Bing stalk you like Google? If not, MS should do a marketing campaign on that topic, like duckduckgo. People are sick of big tech selling their stalking profile.
Yeah.... I doubt it. Bing still stalks.

I've been using Bing because it's the only international search engine that works in China, but I wish I could use duckduckgo without the need for VPN.
 
bing is a good alternative but if you are concerned about privacy it's not gonna do you much good. you'll be better off than if you were using google, sure, but MS will stalk you too.

use duckduckgo instead. i ditched Google last year, tried bing, and now use DDG on everything. if you use DDG you can type "!g" at the start of your search and it will search google for you. It helps you adjust to using a new search engine. I used !g for a while when I started but now i don't use it at all. DDG is perfectly fine for my use.

if you decide to ditch google then why not try go further? if you use any google products try alternatives. this time last year i was using google search, gmail, had a pixel phone, used google maps, youtube, and done it all on google chrome. now the only google product i use is YouTube. i now use DDG search, Outlook/iCloud email, iPhone, Apple/Open Street Maps, and Safari/Firefox browsers.
 
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Thirty7ven

Banned
I don’t know anybody who uses bing, only ever read about it online from people who are into this whole rewards scheme MS created to convince scavengers.
 
Duckduckgo is based on bing, right? For me it's still an inferior search engine for specific and local searches, but it works well for general searches and for finding pics.
Thought so too, but according to the wiki duckduckgo draws from a stack of sources. With that said I use ddg almost exclusively, maybe startpage for something really specific
 

Elysion

Banned
Google has been manipulating and censoring search results for certain topics for a while now. I don’t think Bing is doing that (yet), so that’s definitely a big point in their favor.

Edit: Use the image search of the english version of Google (google.com) and search for ‘American inventors’. Look at the photos that are shown. Then use the same search phrase in German: ‘Amerikanische Erfinder’. Interesting difference, right? You should try other languages too; it seems if you use Spanish or French the results are similar to what you get in English. Would be interesting to know which languages are more in line with the German results, and which are closer to the English ones.
 
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Husky

THE Prey 2 fanatic
I switched to Bing years ago after trying a few different blind search engine tests. I think all Google has going for it is name recognition.
 

TTOOLL

Member
bing is a good alternative but if you are concerned about privacy it's not gonna do you much good. you'll be better off than if you were using google, sure, but MS will stalk you too.

use duckduckgo instead. i ditched Google last year, tried bing, and now use DDG on everything. if you use DDG you can type "!g" at the start of your search and it will search google for you. It helps you adjust to using a new search engine. I used !g for a while when I started but now i don't use it at all. DDG is perfectly fine for my use.

if you decide to ditch google then why not try go further? if you use any google products try alternatives. this time last year i was using google search, gmail, had a pixel phone, used google maps, youtube, and done it all on google chrome. now the only google product i use is YouTube. i now use DDG search, Outlook/iCloud email, iPhone, Apple/Open Street Maps, and Safari/Firefox browsers.

Did the same, no regrets. I wish Apple had its own search engine.
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
I tried it for a month to get the bing rewards… and I found it lacking. Going back to google was like an instant relief. There is just still too much of a gap right now. Kinda like how google maps vs Apple Maps use to be. Only recently has Apple Maps become a strong competitor
 
Google is more reliable but their stagnation is out on display for everyone. I use edge but I still don't use bing. It brings windows phone PTSD to me.

I feel this.

I use Firefox/Chrome/Edge for diff purposes and I keep Firefox defaulted to bing for the rewards... and as much as I'd like it to compete with Google... it doesn't. It's getting better but it's got a ways to go. It's damn near impossible to beat Google's footprint/algorithms at this point.
 
I tried it for a month to get the bing rewards… and I found it lacking. Going back to google was like an instant relief. There is just still too much of a gap right now. Kinda like how google maps vs Apple Maps use to be. Only recently has Apple Maps become a strong competitor
when I used bing the search results were fine for me. The rewards I gave up on I felt like it took too long to earn anything other than the option to donate to charity.

I gave up using Google maps and now have Apple Maps installed for my car. The iOS 15 update is bringing a lot of good changes in maps. I’m on the beta and quite impressed with it.
 

BigBooper

Member
bing is a good alternative but if you are concerned about privacy it's not gonna do you much good. you'll be better off than if you were using google, sure, but MS will stalk you too.

use duckduckgo instead. i ditched Google last year, tried bing, and now use DDG on everything. if you use DDG you can type "!g" at the start of your search and it will search google for you. It helps you adjust to using a new search engine. I used !g for a while when I started but now i don't use it at all. DDG is perfectly fine for my use.

if you decide to ditch google then why not try go further? if you use any google products try alternatives. this time last year i was using google search, gmail, had a pixel phone, used google maps, youtube, and done it all on google chrome. now the only google product i use is YouTube. i now use DDG search, Outlook/iCloud email, iPhone, Apple/Open Street Maps, and Safari/Firefox browsers.
I don't use Chrome anymore, but I decided I didn't care enough to do the monumental task of leaving Gmail.
 

RiccochetJ

Gold Member
It's a decent alternative and they've continually gotten better. Like you mentioned, the rewards are a nice tradeoff for maybe having to do a bit more work. Surprised at all the mentions about duckduckgo. That search engine must have gotten enormously better since I last tried to search for something with it.
 

ZehDon

Gold Member
I use Bing as my main search engine. Occasionally - once a week or so - I need to use Google to find something because the relevance isn't there on Bing, and I don't know the specific keywords I need to use to get what I want to actually show up. But, by and large, I'm nearly completely done with Google. Give it a year, and I doubt I'd ever use it again.
 

Tschumi

Member
0.0

My opinion of Bing is, perhaps outdated... But it is constant... It's only getting clicks because Microsoft banks on the majority of its customers not knowing how to change the default search engine.
 
Edge browser and Bing are my go to default. Maps I still prefer Google but generally Bing has far less ads and shows more relevant organic search results than Google (perhaps with the exception of programming/IT support stuff). They also censor and manipulate far less with better region support IMO. The MS rewards is great too, we basically cash in $10-$30 odd Xbox bucks every month.
 
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