Official "Firefox With Bing" Released 274
MrSeb writes "Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited — the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site — but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users. Mozilla might be readying a large-scale switch to Bing when its current contract with Google expires in November."
Other Engines? (Score:2)
I don't get the whole point of this version.
Is it some mix of Anti-Google, so "we must go to Bing, which somehow is related to former Yahoo Search?"
What about the third party providers, ones who could use the traffic metrics? Ask.com comes to mind. Or StartPage that (supposedly) doesn't record your ip address. Or DuckDuckGo. Or something.
Why are there only like 12 players in all of Tech?
Re:Other Engines? (Score:4, Informative)
The whole point of that version is, "Microsoft paid Mozilla enough to release a Binged version of Firefox".
Most of Mozilla's income comes from Google paying Mozilla for every time someone searches Google using the Firefox start page or the search bar.
Re:Other Engines? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that having an alternative lined up puts Mozilla in a stronger bargaining position for any new Google contract negotiations.
Re: (Score:2)
The point of it is diversification. Mozilla is still heavily dependent upon Google for revenue, and even with this switch that will remain the case, but it will somewhat lessen the need for Mozilla to keep in good with Google to keep the dollars flowing.
Also it gives those of us that avoid using Google an alternative that helps fund Mozilla.
DuckDuckGo (Score:2)
I'd much rather see a version of Firefox that used DuckDuckGo by default (http://ddg.gg)
Then set it to duckduckgo! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Me too, but that's not quite exactly what I said:
I'd much rather see a version of Firefox that used DuckDuckGo by default (http://ddg.gg)
Show your support for the Duck :) (Score:3)
To Firefox [getsatisfaction.com]
To Ubuntu [ubuntu.com]
DuckDuckGo is more in line with Mozilla's Manifesto [mozilla.org] in that it:
Re: (Score:2)
It also probably doesnt provide financial support to mozilla, which they need far more than you need to be saved from the effort of setting your own search engine.
Unless of course those 3 clicks are worth millions of dollars to you, in which case Im sure you could convince Mozilla to switch engines by providing said financial incentive.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
As opposed to Google which is the main source of revenue for Mozilla. The point is that diversification is good, it was always somewhat of a risk to be getting that large a portion of total revenue from a competitor.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, you just made that up. Or did your PR department tell you to write that?
Re: (Score:2)
Just like Google then. And actually Bing users tend to be from more wealthier demographics than most Google users, so it does make business sense to them.
If true, you should have no trouble backing up that claim with some verifiable data.
Go on... we're waiting.
Just making sure Google is listening... (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is this is a shot across the bow of Google. Letting Google know that it's pretty easy for them to switch the default search traffic to Bing is just good business. I'm sure Microsoft is going to be bidding pretty heavily to get Firefox's search user base.
In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them. I think Google pays something like $60 or $70 million a year for all the Firefox user searches. That's chump change to someone like Google. I suspect after this, the next contract renewal might be a higher number.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah? Even now Chrome has overtaken FF in the UK [reuters.com] with the writing clearly on the wall for the rest of the world?
Re: (Score:3)
I think we're settling in to a browser renaissance here. With all the major browsers being mostly equivalent feature wise people will just choose what works best for them. I suspect we'll have a three way race for browser usage between Chrome, IE, and Firefox. I suspect the market share will level out, and there won't be a CLEAR winner like there was when IE6 dominated.
Even if Chrome gets market share Firefox will still have its place, and still be relevant.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Haven't you seen my atlas?
Pink from sunrise to sunset, old boy...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why does everyone have to immediately call troll these days? Germany is a good counter-example for the claim that the world follows what happens in the UK. I'd also generally consider Germany to be more of a trend-setter than the UK. And if you believe that, it's a clear example of how one small country does NOT typically set the trend for the world as the stats for Germany don't look like anything we're seeing globally.
In all, calm down. He made some good points if you actually follow the train of thought
Re: (Score:2)
You went trough all the countries, then followed up with how Opera has a tiny user base even in Norway... yet somehow completely missed Russia [statcounter.com]. Point is, the global trend isn't global, the different countries have their own distinct trends, that the UK is similar to the average doesn't mean much. Brazil seems to be absolutely in love with Chrome. In India Chrome is neck to neck with Firefox and both are going up in favour of IE. Chrome is gaining in Europe overall, but slowly with IE and Firefox battling fo
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe. Or maybe it's going to piss them off when somebody they have had a business relationship with for years goes "hey, just because we have a deal and you give us tens of millions of dollars and like 90% of our revenue, we'll still find ways to make pretty much the same deal with somebody else at the same time."
If somebody had grabbed the source, changed the default and offere
Re: (Score:2)
In the end it's just going to keep Google honest and make sure they pay a fair price for the search traffic Firefox sends them. I think Google pays something like $60 or $70 million a year for all the Firefox user searches. That's chump change to someone like Google
It may be chump change for Google, but it is life and death for the Moz Foundation.
95% of its annual income,
"Rest assured that this is a joint project" (Score:2)
The usual... (Score:4, Funny)
Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture
RIP Mozilla
Re: (Score:3)
This sort of thing should just be called "pulling a Novell".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Or, they could be competing with Netflix for the "Worst technology business decision of 2011" award.
I heard that they have a statue this year!
I've never used Bing... (Score:2)
I must admit I haven't really used Bing much until I read this article. Just as a test today I set my default search engine to Bing and it's surprisingly decent! It's a very decent alternative to Google now. Seeing as Microsoft loses money [searchenginewatch.com] on search I don't mind using it either.
With Google being as big as it is, and having it's finger in EVERYTHING, makes me nervous. Having a viable alternative just serves to keep them honest.
I've actually been using bing lately (Score:5, Interesting)
I love google as a company. I love android, I love gmail, and I love google calendar. I use and heavily rely on all three.
However google's search engine as of recent is very disappointing, largely as a result of a few so called "fixes."
Google recently did away with the ability to add + before a word to prevent from using synonyms for that word, so when you want to do a literal search for anything, you MUST surround it in quotes. Very annoying.
I've been finding that as of late, google appears to be omitting some kewords from my search. The page summary doesn't include some of the words, and worse is that when you go to the page, and hit ctrl-f, you can't even find one of the omitted keyword! Frustrating as hell.
The most annoying, is when you type a search term with google instant, and sometimes when you arrow back to inline edit your search while instant is coming up, or if you accidentally move the mouse over one of the search suggestions, it removes your original search and replaces it with one of the search suggestions, causing you to have to re-type the whole thing! And turning off google instant isn't a reliable solution, because when you lose the cookie, or move to a computer that doesn't have one, you have to go and turn it off again.
I've been using bing lately and thankfully it doesn't suffer from these problems. I'd like to go back to google, but until they can solve these problems I'll be using bing for a while.
Re: (Score:2)
Google recently did away with the ability to add + before a word to prevent from using synonyms for that word, so when you want to do a literal search for anything, you MUST surround it in quotes. Very annoying.
Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?
Anyway, what makes moving away from Google surprisingly hard is that it really does learn from your search history (and probably all the other stuff that Google gathers on you) - in my case, at least, it consistently gives me better results, but only if I'm logged in. It probably helps that my primary email is GMail and my primary IM is GTalk, and, more recently, my primary social network is G+ - and I don't
Re: (Score:2)
Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?
Having to type double the characters is a pretty huge degradation in usability. Google seems also to be getting increasingly suspicious of human input, which will require more and more coded notation to override...until the search box simply isn't there one day.
Re: (Score:2)
Um, so you're very annoyed by the fact that you have to type two characters ("") instead of one (+)?
Yes. I don't care when I know that I need the literal modifier when I'm initially typing the query. I DO care when I typed a reasonable query and Google does some dumb interpretation of it. With quotes, I now have to either switch to my mouse twice to insert the pair, or use a lot of arrow keys to move across the word. Either way is more annoying than using a single +.
I also don't like overloading the String operator with Literal functionality.
I'll grant that fuzzy-search-default is a benefit to average
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I just changed my home page from google to duckduckgo. It's been set to google for over a decade, but this shit with removing the + operator was the last straw. Some of the other stuff (like the black bar and the preview and moving the cache link to the stupid preview thing) was basically cosmetic, but doing away with the plus operator decreases the functionality of their core product. This has really created a lot of extra, stupid work for me (super frustrated that it was all because of the google+ crap).
Re: (Score:2)
You wouldn't believe how much I agree with you about Google's features being a seriously irritating downgrade. But switching to bing is like driving around in a dump truck because your car rattles a little bit...
I discovered Google early, and jumped on it instantly, converting everyone I knew. Google seriously raised the bar from the cespool of lousy search engines, and I'll be forever greatful for that.
However, google undeniably values quantity over quality, so they've serious deprioritized the sites you
Re: (Score:3)
I'm giving Bing a try for a while myself. It seems to do a better job of finding Canadian government sites and documents, but Google is better for finding tech references and API documentation.
But what really surprise me is how much more readable the results of Bing Translate are than Google Translate. Bing is lightyears ahead on this one. Score one for Microsoft.
Indicates what? (Score:2)
I think it clearly indicates that they are willing to take Microsoft's money to distribute a product with different defaults, I don't think its all that clear that it means anything more.
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't even indicate that. All it indicates is that Mozilla allowed Microsoft to use the "Firefox" trademark for this particular modification of an existing open-source browser. Just like Twitter, Yahoo, Yandex, and various other parties are already doing. See http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/10/26/offering-a-customized-firefox-experience-for-bing-users/ [mozilla.com]
Just what Bing needs... (Score:2)
Becoming the default search engine on a secondary version of another browser with a declining market share. Is MS trying to implode or are they just clueless?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe MS is smart about the future, and TFS is wrong about the direction this points. Maybe its not about the future of Mozilla -- dumping Google -- but instead about the future of Microsoft's browser. Maybe after testing the water with "Firefox with Bing", MS just adopts that in place of IE. Given the plethora of devices with browser, Microsoft's wani
Re: (Score:2)
IE 9 is nothing like IE 6. It is a competive browser with no lockin.
Extensions? Native Linux port? Didn't think so.
Also the latest HTML 5 score for IE 10 shows a 306 score with bonus points. Opera 12 alpha, by comparison, is the highest pre-release (346+9 bonus). And IE 9 is abysmal.
Not about user experience (Score:2)
Users can set whatever search engine they want, this has nothing to do with "Bing's abilities". The biggest income of browser developers comes from search sites paying to be default. In this case, Microsoft payed more than Google.
what is this shit?! (Score:2)
i've used mozilla stuff since 2002. i used mozilla then pheonix then firefox. i was around for the good and the bad but this tears it. seriously, it seems like 2011 is the year of bat shit crazy decisions over at mozilla. nay, 2011 is the year of bat shit crazy decisions at mozilla. all mozilla has done lately is follow everything chrome does and now this! what is this, google envy?
the people steering mozilla need a swift kick in the pants because they are acting like a drunken bard out on sunset boul
...Seriously? (Score:3)
Firefox is suffering from a decline in market share, over fixable technical issues, massive memory leaks, and you spend your time making firefox with bing? Not to mention that the last few releases have been nothing but cheap knock offs of chrome. I want my browser back!
Yes, seriously. (Score:2)
What kind of massive development effort do you think it takes for Mozilla to set the default search provider to Bing that it will literally take away from fixing "massive" memory leaks and "technical issues"? Should they just say to hell with it and take whatever scraps Google offers them and lay off half their developers because Google doesn't want to pay them much for the next contract?
You must live in some kind of utopian version of reality to think that they shouldn't have to run their organization like
Re: (Score:2)
Your experiences do not speak for everyone's. I do use Firefox 7, and occasionally test aurora (nightly). I have not had memory leaks until 6, now it takes over a gig of ram to display 5 tabs after a few days. It's also grown crashier, and the general quality is declining. I too, have used firefox since before it was called firefox, and I can say without a doubt that you're wrong. Either that, or you're not running a *nix based OS, where the memory leaks seem more prevalent.
As for the bing thing, I think it
Re: (Score:2)
The reason many Slashdot-readers might dislike Firefox usually has absolutely nothing to do with why normal people switch. Do you honestly think that memory leaks would make the average Joe switch to something else? No, it's because:
1) Chrome gets a LOT of advertising. It's on Google's front page, ads on web pages, included as "bonuses" for some software installs (like those pointless toolbars), etc.
2) Chrome has a simpler UI than Firefox somewhat. It's not "Traditional", but what do most people who are wil
Re: (Score:2)
I use firefox as well, it's just getting irritating.
Active Directory / Group Policy (Score:2)
A Fix for Google Instant? (Score:2)
So, this is the FF 'permanent fix' for Google Instant?
If so.. I give it a 7/10 - worth trying to protect users from the utter crap that is Instant.
I can't say I like M$, I can't say I've really used Bing, but I could really get to hating google if this continues.
If google don't stop messing with their front page they are going to lose a lot more people.
I would not be surprised if Bing took over from Google as the default. If google continues on this path.. I might even welcome it.
Microsoft: (Score:2)
...always looking for another dog to tie bricks to the head of...
How the mighty have fallen (Score:2)
You know why they're doing this, right? For years, the only thing that has really made Mozilla Corp. any money is their Google partnership. In fact, they got a little greedy over the years because of it, and have really whored Firefox out with lots of changes primarily to lure in people, and rushed out versions to look competitive with other browsers (sometimes even dropping features just to meet unnecessarily rushed release dates), to the point that they turned it into the same bloated mess which was the
Great... now it's version 14 (Score:2)
So I guess they bumped the version number up because of this major change.
open OSS search (Score:2)
This raises the question: when do we get an "open" open-source* search engine?
*one we have the source-code to, so we know that our search results are genuine; and also one we can rely on for not sharing our thoughts with other parties.
Re:Bing (Score:4, Informative)
More astroturfing from TechLA.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm more confused about what is said over why it is said.
A good thesis has three parts: Who, What, and Why
Now, I see plenty of who and what, but no why.
"This is also the reason why Google is struggling in non-western world like China and Russia. They didn't get there by the time internet got wider usage, so they cannot get market share now." -- really? A company that doesn't like censoring and tried to find ways to not censor legally does not get common usage in a country that loves to censor? I'm talking a
Re: (Score:3)
Well, one thing I like about Bing is the bird's eye view maps. They're far more useful than Google's satellite view when I'm looking at large properties, or doing architecture models to scale. Guess that makes me an MS shill.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, while I haven't seen any advantage in their search results the times I've used Bing, I have noticed their maps are frequently much better than Google's. How long exactly did it take Google to finally recognize, for example, that Louisville, Kentucky is a city and should have its name shown on the map? Many years IIRC. I constantly see blatant errors in Google Maps information, but sending in fixes never does any good. I've given up trying.
Re:Google competitor (Score:4, Interesting)
But when that competitor is Microsoft the metagame changes. MS is famous for doing a little of everything, so they're always Fourth in a market, trying to look like "underdogs" while they still have the fading WinOffice monopoly.
Re:Bing (Score:5, Informative)
Check out his history, it pretty much confirms Radres' claim.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Last time he popped up it was with another huge wall of copy paste garbage for WinPhone.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, just shills who copy paste in a wall of marketing drivel.
I like how you make excuses too, just like a shill. You could not even stick with your hate of products, you had to make excuses.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Nope, just when you use clearly prewritten content.
Shilling on public websites is big business these days. Political parties do it, the Chinese Government does it, and I am sure whoever is paying you is doing it too.
Steam is pretty nice, I love that it works so well in wine.
Re:Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been accused of shilling for very many companies just because I commented something positive about them
Since you pretty much only post positive stories about MS - nice, big, semi-articulate stories, as opposed to two sentence rants - yeah, you're a shill, and lying about it. Must be a sucky job, be paid to lie repeatedly.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Duh, a conspiracy and a sin are not the same thing.
Re: (Score:3)
Pretty easy to change the default (Score:2)
I don't get this. My Google-defaulted Mozilla makes it really easy to switch to Bing. It's right there in the pulldown list, which is way more than I can say for IE, which is supposed to make it easy to switch from the Bing default to another search engine, but which acutally puts you through some pretty tricky hoops to install another search engine from an MS website. When I tried it on a co-worker's machine, it wouldn't install (either because their IE version wasn't compatible or because the machine w
Re: (Score:2)
Considering that 96.42% of firefox users don't even know that about:config exists even if they wanted to change it back to google, there is a vague point.
(I won't even get into the amount of times I've boggled at people entering yahoo.co.jp into the search bar and th
Re: (Score:2)
That's a whole 'nother level of Rube Goldberg there going to a japanese search engine to just type in the URL. At that point, one would wonder if the user even examines the screen while navigating.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Oh yeah, Microsoft having a monopoly on desktop computing and office suites is such an underpowered position to start from..
The real reason they're failing is because IE is still fucking lame. I prefer the IE6 UI over the crap that they have in 7 and up. And no, I don't use IE6.
I used to reorganise FFs toolbar to tidy it up. Chrome actually had things set up exactly the same as my FF custom arrangement by default, only without a search bar or menu to waste space. As soon as it had adblock, I was there.
When
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
IE9's rendering engine is pretty good, but the new UI is strange and (imho) not very good. It's kind of a pity, because it's reasonably fast.
Back in the IE6 days there used to be hundreds of programs claiming to be web browsers that were just a front end GUI wrapped around an IE engine object...
Do programs like that exist anymore for IE9? Might be a big opportunity for someone to ride that wave while IE9 lasts.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to think that about IE9, then I had to travel using a small laptop (borderline netbook), a Celeron with 2GB RAM. Chrome is fast, IE9 takes forever to start and after a few tabs it make the whole computer unusable.
And now that the single most important missing feature has been added to Chrome (being able to right-click to select context menu items) they will pry this browser from my cold, dead hands!
But yeah, IE9 looks cool.
All you need to know below: (Score:3)
Can Mozilla piss off their users any more? (Score:2, Interesting)
Every move that Mozilla has made lately has done nothing but piss off their long-time users.
First it was not fixing the memory usage and performance problems that have plagued Firefox for years now. This is something that users keep begging Mozilla to fix, but it never happens. Firefox is always slower than Chrome, Safari, Opera and now even the more recent versions of IE!
Then there are the Firefox UI changes they've made with recent releases that only make it so much harder to use Firefox. Please bring bac
Re: (Score:3)
Chrome isn't any better with the developers holier than though attitudes. There have been feature requests that have been very highly voted for they they just keep turning down even though it would be a simple toggle on and off feature that could default to off. One such exam
Re: (Score:2)
Ad Block on Chrome downloads everything and then hides elements
Actually, this was fixed and AdBlock for Chrome has prevented ads from downloading starting with version 2.0.
Re:Can Mozilla piss off their users any more? (Score:4, Informative)
As a professional developer in the web/services space, I'm using firebug most of the time. I find it most capable of dealing with highly dynamic DOM/css. There are most definitely bugs and issues with it but they aren't deal breakers. It does crash. Some stuff doesn't work. You sometimes get back garbage values. But all that considered, I still find it to be a better debugging tool than either the IE dev tools or chrome's tools. I'll also say that I do use all three toolsets. This isn't an "i only use firebug" fanboy reaction. I live and breath all three, as well as a pile of proprietary internal tools. But as far as debugging highly complex dynamic pages, firebug is my first choice by far.
Re: (Score:2)
Then there are the Firefox UI changes they've made with recent releases that only make it so much harder to use Firefox. Please show the protocol in the URL bar again!
There's a work-around (either built into FF or through an addon) to get it back to working like it should.
LMGTFY (Score:2, Informative)
about:config -> browser.urlbar.trimURLs = false
Boom, done. Was that so hard to Google?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well it is rather similar to sticking with Google search because you prefer Google street view in the new higher resolution to M$ offerings.
Reality is there is nothing stopping M$ grabbing that mozilla source creating a M$ branded Firefox and releasing it in parallel in M$ internet explorer as long as they adhere to the conditions of the open source licence.
This move could be a seen as a step in that direction.
Re: (Score:2)
Folks who love Microsoft products but not IE? People who don't trust Google with their search data but think it's safe with Bing? Who would want this?
I assume that this is for the Mozilla Foundation and they are the ones that want it because MS is paying them for it. MS probably promised them a larger share of the advertising revenue than they were getting from Google.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they should just come out and say it.
Re: (Score:2)
A bigger cut of less searches is not the sort of deal you want to make.
The Mozilla Foundation does not understand their target market I think. Such a deal will cost them users. Users that will switch to Chrome.
Re: (Score:2)
Such a deal will cost them users.
Contrary to popular belief here at slashdot, the vast majority of people don't hold a 20 year grudge against a company that has been releasing quality software as of late.
Re: (Score:2)
Users who prefer a highly customizeable, performant browser in line with FOSS principles, but who are so fickle that they cant be bothered to choose their own search engine?
Come on, I dont use Bing, but its not AWFUL, and it takes all of 3 seconds to switch to google or whatever else you might want. Mozilla needs money, this gets them money, and the cost to users is negligible.
Re: (Score:2)
Good point.
Re: (Score:2)
This is for people who may want the browser. We're not talking about the default Firefox version here or anything. Anyone can take Firefox and modify it; the only question is whether the result can be called Firefox. That last bit is the only story here.
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/10/26/offering-a-customized-firefox-experience-for-bing-users/ [mozilla.com] has more details if you care... and mentions that there are also customized builds being distributed by Twitter, Yahoo, and so forth.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say there's a fair number of people who are satisfied or prefer WindowsXP/Windows 7 but use Chrome or Firefox. In fact I think the internal statistics of Microsoft employees places IE usage low. As well as a high penetration of iPhone.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Google create a fake query and it showed up on Bing. You and TechLA are a obviously shills. The only people in the tech world that believes google made this up is you
From Google:
We created about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. Below is an example:
To be clear, th
Re:Whats this "instead of Google" shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
The USER is voluntarily submitting that data.
What data? The result provided by a third-party search engine. Doing it that way is just a way to cover their legal asses - it doesn't fundamentally change what they were doing.
Fact is, they don't need such techniques to track searches on Bing, since they control the website and can put the tracking there (and which would track *every* Bing search, not only Toolbar ones).
Therefore, the only reason to track through the Toolbar is to take advantage of the results provided by other engines.
Re:Whats this "instead of Google" shit? (Score:4, Informative)
You thought wrong. [zdnet.com]
Did you actually read the article you linked to? Microsoft denies it, yes, but the article seems to come up with the same conclusion, that they did use Google to get some of their results (obviously, they can't use Google for **all** their results, because they'd lose their #1 ranking for many of their own internet properties, not something that they would want).
Just read the quote from Bing's Vice President, Harry Shum, on that very same article you linked to. His denial is so guarded, tangential, and so carefully well-crafted, that it's not telling us anything of what really happened. His failed attempt at obfuscation is pretty damning. If you ask me, he should just have kept his mouth shut.
Re: (Score:2)
Try reading what he linked to.. they copy everything, not just Google. So yes, they copy, but not in the way that you allege.
They also auto-correct spelling without notifying you that they've done so, so torsorophy is not a smoking gun. Their honeypot experiment was much better proof of copying. It's not a bad idea for improving search relevancy, but pretty creepy at the same time. Next time I see an MS shill complaining about Google's datamining/privacy policies, I'll have to point this one out.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
True, true. The question is, however, who is the 'someone else' and what 'work' are you 'taking' (and yeah, it's not theft - it's not even copyright infringement for that matter).
Let's go with the either pro-Google- or anti-Microsoft-centric view first and say the 'someone else' is Google and the 'work' is the results Google returns when searching for a query. How does Google get those results? Well, from the page domain set up by the domain owner, from the page title set up by
Re: (Score:3)
I take it you haven't used Bing lately, probably the only advantage that I see to Google is that Google has more granularity with the bots. In practice, I don't typically notice that results from things I'm looking for are reliable when they're less than a day or two old anyways, as they're frequently unanswered posts or in progress.
When I experimented with Bing, I found that the quality was pretty similar to what Google was offering, by which I mean it sucked just as much. I've since moved over to duckduck