
Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing - domino
http://myprasanna.posterous.com/birth-and-death-of-microsoft-bing
======
raganwald
Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and
grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but
then I began to enjoy its rough feel.

After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a
product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The
story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between
process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening
the ship/fix cycle on the other.

This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, _it is itself an
example of a shortened write/fix cycle_.

When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was
reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the
author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive
editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the
idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.

Great stuff!

~~~
myprasanna
I'm the author of this post and by no means I expected this to be on the top
of HN today. It was a surprise. I din't do any good editing on this, since it
was my personal blog and I had sent to Michael Arrington, who wanted to
edit/publish it. For some reason, he backed out at the last moment and it
din't make it to TC. Welcome to the world of citizen journalism.

Sorry about the typos/errors. I'm looking into this now :)

~~~
AJ007
Was this get modified? I didn't notice anything reading through.

------
latch
The OP seems to attribute the "failure" of bing to common problems associated
with Microsoft (in specific) and large companies (in general). With a specific
point that it all started wonderfully, then got corporatized. I'm happy
believing that this was the main problem.

But...as an end user i don't think Bing was/is ever as as close to Google as
the OP seems to think.

~~~
exit
why was kami8844's comment instantly flagged?

it's really disgusting to see people quietly being blacklisted.

\---

1 point by kami8844 0 minutes ago | link [dead]

I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and
only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the
various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good
Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases and unconventional searches
(where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition. While Bing
came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still
wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.

\---

~~~
gjm11
I wonder whether it's an automatic consequence of having substantial negative
karma.

(I'm ambivalent about the stealth-blacklisting thing. It's probably the right
thing to do with genuinely abusive users. It might be the right thing with
people genuinely incapable of contributing much. But I've seen too many cases
where someone's comments are all being auto-deaded -- invisibly to them, AIUI
-- with no obvious reason why they should deserve it.)

~~~
jules
Right, the system is far too trigger happy. Instead of showing a newcomer what
kind of comments are valued here and possibly gaining a valuable new
contributor, the system severely punishes beginner mistakes. We can't
reasonably expect that a new user knows what kind of comments are valued
because on the rest of the internet such comments are perfectly acceptable.
Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you
have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments.

~~~
redthrowaway
"Perhaps something like Quora does would help: before you can use the site you
have to do a quiz on what kind of comments are good comments."

Really? Sorry, but that sounds like a terrible idea. HN is already insular
enough, we don't need to start demanding newcomers pass a test before we let
them comment.

~~~
jules
Let's see. There are two groups of people: people who would have passed the
test and people who would not have. The people who would not have would most
likely be hellbanned after their first 3 comments (and of course people are
allowed to take the test as many times as they want). So you lose nothing. By
using a test fewer legitimate people get hellbanned. In other words, this is
only going to improve the situation. I'm not talking about a difficult test
here: just a couple of questions like:

Comment: LOL

Is this an acceptable comment?

Right now people are used to that being an acceptable comment on the rest of
the internet. These people currently get hellbanned on HN because other people
downvote these comments. It's not a test for testing whether the people are
acceptable on HN, it's method of teaching customs and a test for whether
people have read the guidelines.

~~~
redthrowaway
I'm not opposed to it because I think it wouldn't keep bad posters off, I'm
opposed to it because it would keep _most_ posters off. It's arrogant and
self-righteous. "Sorry, you have to _prove_ you're good enough to post on our
holy news aggregator."

It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth and it's the last thing this community
needs.

~~~
jules
So you're saying that the current method of silencing those people without
even notifying them is preferred? They keep posting and most times their posts
add value. Yet these posts are invisible to users without the showdead option
on.

~~~
redthrowaway
The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which comments
are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone you see
who hasn't caught on yet works, as well.

What do you think the likes of a Matt Cutts would do if they were trying to
sign up for HN and the site forced them to say whether "LOL" was an
appropriate comment before allowing them to post? It's insulting and arrogant
and will drive away the kind of people we want posting here. All that for a
"problem" that is invisible the vast majority of the time.

~~~
jules
Stopping famous people from signing up is a good point.

On the other hand the system is clearly broken now.

> The karma metric is pretty transparent. You learn very quickly which
> comments are and are not appreciated. Dropping a friendly comment to someone
> you see who hasn't caught on yet works, as well.

This is not the case as it is currently implemented. If one of your first
comments gets downvoted you get hellbanned. There is no chance to learn from
your mistakes. Dropping a friendly comment doesn't work either because you
cannot respond to hellbanned people. Do you have showdead on? Try it and
you'll probably see that about half of the hellbanned people still posting
invisible comments are legitimate. For example you will find 3 of those people
commenting on this post, two of them having no idea that nobody is reading
their comments.

For example look at <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bshock>

This guy has been banned for 2 downvoted comments and has been posting
legitimate but invisible comments for over a year. You can clearly see the
learning effects: his first couple of comments are not HN quality.
Unfortunately by the time he got accustomed to HN he had been silenced.

~~~
redthrowaway
I think we can fix hellbanning without too much tinkering. Perhaps a simple
notice if someone's first posts are downvoted advising them to check the
submissions and comments guidelines, perhaps with some common first time
mistakes and their more preferable counterparts added. That should help the
noobs while still allowing trolls to be banned.

------
enjo
This is tangential, but somehow related:

My level of frustration Redmond has reached epic levels. My company spends
thousands of dollars a week managing advertising campaigns on Adcenter. They
have an API which has been nothing but issues, but given the breadth of our
advertising base it's absolutely necessary that we use it.

Today we have entered day number FIVE of an outage in which the API (at least
one critical portion of it) simply errors out no matter what call you make. So
for five days we've been unable to pause campaigns, change bid prices, or
otherwise do anything to effectively manage our campaigns.

It's nuts. This is the second major outage in the last couple of weeks. The
part that KILLS me is that nobody in Redmond seems to give a damn. They
announced that they had a problem two days after I brought it to their
attention. They are apparently working on some sort of fix that may or may not
be pushed sometime in the last three days.

Meanwhile we are absolutely blowing through cash because of the things that we
can't adjust. We're tens of thousands of keywords spread out over more than a
thousand campaigns. We don't employ anybody to manage these by hand...

~~~
forwardslash
I assume you're using the REST API? While they try and roll out a fix, have
you tried to use the adCenter Desktop to at least somewhat manage the ads?

~~~
AJ007
That might work if adcenter desktop was actually stable!

~~~
robryan
That would be of little comfort I'd imagine if you had a lot of custom stuff
running through the API. At least they opened the thing up recently to add
customers, that's a step in the right direction. (Although that could also be
the cause of instability, they did have years to prepare for it though.)

------
mattmanser
The whole article seems to be back to front.

As far as I knew Live search was essentially failing then they made it Bing
and it's started to succeed.

Am I missing something here or what?

I'm no expert on the history but it seems to me that the opposite of what the
author is saying actually happened!

~~~
nchlswu
I think that's one of the objectives of this article; provide that alternate
perspective.

I thought that Bing was the true turning point as well, but I never gave Live
Search a fair chance then, and I don't think many others did either.

To me, it looks like the author saw Bing/Live Search as something truly
transformational within Microsoft. Public perception was that Live was a
failure. But if I understand currently, the team was easily beating internal
estimates extremely fast . For one reason or another there was a team
reorganization that coincided with the PowerSet acquisition and the Bing
rebrand. While there was a jump in market share, the foundation of the Bing
team was taken out from under them and replaced with MS status quo.

Bing's death isn't a result of their success or failure as a search engine.
Bing's death refers to the loss of something that could have made a difference
in Microsoft, internally. The death of a team that could have done something
truly great , (EDIT: as said by Cicero, when they were at their peak).

~~~
dwc
_> Public perception was that Live was a failure._

At that time I was paying a lot of attention to search results, from two
perspectives: 1) I had some slightly unusual / difficult searches I performed
regularly, and 2) examining search terms that brought people to some sites I
ran.

For case 1, Google simply wiped the floor with Live. Note that Live had the
most relevant results in their index, but they'd be _way_ down on the 5th
page, 10th page, wherever.

For case 2, the majority of people coming to my sites from Live were coming
there with search terms indicating that they did not want my site. For
example, I had content for Phoenix, AZ and some polls. My site stayed within
the top 5 on Live for search terms like "phoenix polling locations." Of course
every site gets some of this from any search engine, but with Live is was
problematic.

My perception was that Live was a failure, and I think my reasons were valid.

~~~
nchlswu
I was too young and never paid attention to search results. I definitely think
your reasons are valid.

I didn't intend to say people's perspectives weren't, rather that from an
insider's perspective, Live was very much approaching success.

------
Matt_Cutts
"They [Bing] had weekly release cycles - faster than Google back then"

Hmm. I'm gonna have to disagree with that part. :)

~~~
myprasanna
Matt, How long would you estimate, for a search changelist to hit the
production at Google? I've got friends working there. Prepare to be surprised.

~~~
hexis
I think you've got a bit of a surprise in store for you, too, when you find
out what Matt does for a living.

~~~
myprasanna
Got it :)

I still know for a fact that, it takes at-least a month on average, for a
search change list to reach production. Would you disagree Matt?

~~~
shadowmatter
I'm an ex-Googler, and I disagree. Before I left the GWS team
(<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/google_web_server/>) became a model
for how frequent, stable releases should be done within the company. That's
all I'll say.

~~~
myprasanna
I've just recently spoken with my friends, and I know for a fact that it
atleast takes a month from point of checkin to review/test/stage/production.
If you disagree, I think what you are talking about, is probably an exception
and not the norm.

Being secretive about release cycles is pointless stealth.

~~~
Semiapies
What else do you "know for a fact"?

------
athom
"The report of my death was an exaggeration." -- Mark Twain

I was having a look at Terabyte drives in Best Buy yesterday, and while
wondering how well a model might work with Linux, I realized, now the display
computers actually have internet capability, I _should_ be able to look it up
right there in the store! So, I wander over to a convenient laptop, kick it
out of screensaver mode, start up the browser, and plug in the product name.
Only after I hit the search button did I notice WHAT service I was using.
Added bonus: Google was NOT an option.

I'll believe that Bing is dead when it isn't the default search engine in the
default browser on the default operating system at the default computer store.

------
jdp23
Interesting perspectives. I was there in 2006-2007 when they made the decision
to throw resources at the problem and challenge Google head-on in algorithmic
search. The strategy at the time was to become #2 in a duopoly by investing at
a level that Yahoo! couldn't compete with, and focus on the most valuable
searches (travel, shopping, etc.), and leverage Microsoft Research a lot more.

From an abstract business perspective it's worked remarkably well. But if so
many motivated and talented people are leaving, then there's something
fundamentally flawed. And there were a lot of other much-less-expensive
approaches they could have taken instead (or in addition, if they wanted to
shoot for the moon) that would have also created a lot more opportunities for
growth and excitement for younger engineers in particular. Ah well.

------
hanifvirani
Strange. To me, as an outsider, it looks like Bing has just started to get
good enough to be considered as a threat to Google. Of course, they have a
_long long_ way to go. But it appears as a rapidly emerging product rather
than a dying product.

~~~
kenjackson
I agree. It was only in the last year that I could use Bing as my primary
search engine.

------
scorpion032
The biggest problem that comes in the way is the condescending attitude of the
"grown ups". It is very important for the "management" to realize that they
are actually only facilitating what is "happening" and they should let the
system handle itself and get out of the way than get into and disturb the
existing norm.

~~~
raganwald
One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the
incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the
line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly
impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it
happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the
weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing.
The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to
produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and
software process.

So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as
measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a
manager by the amount of managing they _do_ is exactly the same thing as
evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces
results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of
their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down,
rather than facilitating the work actually being done.

In a simplistic world, the answer would be to change the incentives and the
behaviour would change itself. But as they say, "correlation does not equal
causation." The incentives have to change, but so do the people. Results-
oriented managers don't work in those kind of environments to begin with, and
after a year or two in such a place they will already have left. You need to
change the incentives and the culture and the people all together.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Middle managers are rewarded for making budget and meeting release dates.
Seems good, right?

So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So
that success is assured and their metric is optimized.

Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does
this happen?

{opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial
goals) or top management (company goals). They're in the middle, right? With
layers between them and either end.

And when you try to optimize any process with too many degrees of freedom, you
have too many variables and get to choose which ones to look at. So middle
managers look at their own career and ignore the rest.

My suggestion: line up all middle managers in the parking lot (important),
stand at the end of the line, and put one bullet through all of them
(optimizes cost in bullets).

If my company Ever has middle managers, its time to call it quits.

~~~
ajays
I think it's not the presence of middle managers; but how they are evaluated
and incentivized. I don't envy their jobs; the upper managers have entire
teams with clear tasks; the engineers on the other side have stuff to do; the
middle managers are, well, caught in the middle. So they try to make
themselves relevant by injecting themselves into various processes; by
blocking things to make sure that everyone knows that they are present; by
taking credit wherever possible.

So eventually it's the fault of the upper management, if they can't come up
with the right incentive scheme to keep things moving smoothly.

I hate middle-managers too with a passion; but having seen them operate, I
can't blame them for doing what they do. They're just playing the game by the
rules. Blame the one who made up the rules.

------
rufugee
_Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best hackers
for $90K/year when the adjacent teams were making $75K/year offers._

This is what really stood out to me. I'm in tech management these days...I pay
my good developers close to $90K, and I'm no Google or Microsoft. What's wrong
with this picture? Bing was created what...four years ago? Is this really a
realistic salary for the best hackers?

------
fferen
For all the people saying X search engine is better, here's a tool to compare
Google and Bing (and Yahoo) results without bias. It simply shows you three
columns of results, you click on the one with the best results, and it reveals
which ones came from which search engines.

<http://blindsearch.fejus.com/>

Note: I am not affiliated with this site in any way.

~~~
GFischer
Hmmm, it's giving me the wrong results... it shows the results I voted from
are from "Bing", but when I went to Google it showed me those results, and
Bing's results where the ones marked "Yahoo".

See here

[http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&...](http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=21+de+setiembre+y+sarmiento&type=web)

it would have me believe that Bing's were the better results (they weren't for
this particular search).

Also, when I'm logged in and using my country-specific search, Google is way,
way, way better than the competition.

Edit: I'll probably message the creator (parent is not affiliated with the
site)

------
InclinedPlane
I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything
other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years.

Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a
key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a
good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that
(re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates the brand in
doing so. Windows 95 and Windows 7 are perfect examples. IE4 (yes really),
Bing, and Windows Phone 7 are also good examples. One of the big problems with
Microsoft is that its organization and its culture are extremely tied to the
traditional 3-ish year ship cycle. A hugely successful diving catch every
other ship cycle or so is rapidly becoming less and less feasible as a means
to hang on to or acquire a market. Microsoft does not seem to get the web at a
fundamental level, it doesn't seem to have the capacity to release software at
a pace of yearly, monthly, or continuously.

And that will ultimately be the undoing of Bing and the Windows Phone. The
only way MS knows how to crank out releases faster is the deathmarch, and that
is a certain route to doom.

Worse yet, since Gates left MS has no real technical or managerial leadership,
it's bureaucracy all the way up and down. This has been affecting the culture
at Microsoft little by little, also partly coupled to the stock price having
plateaued. More and more talented devs are finding that MS lacks the
excitement and the reward of cutting edge development, so they are moving
elsewhere. Also, without that talent around fewer good projects are pushed
forward, fewer projects succeed, people become less satisfied with their jobs,
etc. (think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" only translate the bad
stuff, on a corporate level, to hundreds and then thousands of George Bailey's
going away). This makes the environment that much less rewarding for everyone
else who remains, so yet more people leave. And slowly but surely the creep of
a more rigid and bureaucratic corporate culture and organization fills in the
gaps left by the people who had the most clout in the company, causing yet
more and more talent to evaporate away.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle that will lead to the rapid diminution of the
company and its prospects over time and the examples the article provides of
the process as it happened at Bing have played out throughout the company.
Nobody young with high prospects seriously considers Microsoft as a
destination anymore, and increasingly the older devs are either retiring on
their massive earnings from the glory days or they're just looking for
somewhere else to be that's a better use of their time and talent.

MS continues to make a crap-ton of money from its core products, but it will
be institutionally ham-strung in responding to the threats that will steal
away that revenue (such as mobile-heritage operating systems). Because those
threats will grow at a rate MS is incapable of competing with.

~~~
brudgers
> _"I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be
> anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years."_

For Microsoft, having a full featured reliable non-core product with
measurable market share is a success because it allows Microsoft to offer
vertical integration without the specter of anti-trust allegations - imagine
the howling in DC and Europe if Bing controlled 70% of search (never mind the
valley).

Bing's robustness helps Microsoft sell software and services, while it's
modest market share keeps infrastructure costs lower and Microsoft's core
revenue stream coming from areas other than search reduces the pressure to
game search algorithms towards their advertisers in order to increase revenue
in the way that Google does.

What the article shows is not that Microsoft is inept, but rather that they
are able to create an internal unit with many elements of a startup, scale
that unit massively, and then transition it into a solid corporate structure
capable of surviving over the long term - in other words, the article shows
that Microsoft was not only able to successfully foster internal
entrepreneurship in order to quickly move into a new market and capture
meaningful market share in the face of a mammoth, entrenched, and powerful
rival which dominated the market, but also to consolidate that position
swiftly before their rival could respond in a significant way.

~~~
Splines
I'm not following you. I imagine that the Bing team would gladly increase
their market share in exchange for the costs involved.

~~~
mredbord
Of course more market share is good. But Microsoft is not purely interested in
growing share with Bing; non-differentiation with Google is a good thing in
and of itself. The less differentiated Microsoft is from Google, the greater
perception of their platform having feature parity with Google. That way
consumers are not forced to choose based on features, just ecosystem.

This is a the reason that Microsoft is a fast copier of market leaders, so
that everything consumers could want, on paper, is housed within their roof
(and Google's). It seems counterintuitive that less differentiation would be
useful, but I think it's what Microsoft is going for.

~~~
Cossolus
Microsoft used to be able to "embrace and extend" in order to extinguish the
competitor. With Bing it seems they can only "embrace", by which I mean
copying and trying to decrease differentiation. But look at the trend. In the
future, when/if Google search incorporates social feedback effects (ala +1),
Bing won't even have the user-base to be able to copy the competitor, let
alone extend and extinguish.

One look at my website statistics tells me Bing is already as good as dead.

~~~
DaveMebs
Yeah, except Bing gets to mine Facebook and Google doesn't. Maybe that's why
it has a higher success rate?

[http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...](http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2010/10/13/bing-
gets-more-social-with-facebook.aspx)

[http://www.stateofsearch.com/bing-gaining-share-in-the-us-
su...](http://www.stateofsearch.com/bing-gaining-share-in-the-us-success-rate-
much-higher-than-google/)

------
jeremydavid
Just thought I'd let you know your text rendered _very_ small on my browser,
and the light grey quotes were almost unreadable.

~~~
steve-howard
Indeed, I have no idea why bloggers are so insistent on using gray-on-white
quotations.

------
tocomment
Bing is dead?

~~~
bartl
Well, according to this post, everyone who was technically knowledgeable about
Bing has left.

That implies that there will no longer be any relevant technical progress, any
more.

~~~
cdesmar
Not sure this is relevant progress but 18 march bing for "HG download" gave no
mercurial results (hg was assumed to be a mistyping of HD), by 24 march it was
giving all mercurial results. I twittered about both.

That is at least anecdotal evidence that things are progressing in some way or
another.

~~~
code_duck
Unpredictability is progress?

~~~
cdesmar
Returning meaningful results is progress.

Why would you want a predictably wrong answer, you must be a manager.

~~~
code_duck
Actually, you've plotted two data points here. That doesn't tell you much.

How do you know it doesn't go back to showing irrelevant results on the 28th?

------
wightnoise
The only value I ever had for Bing was their cashback shopping engine, and
they've gotten rid of that.

Birth and Death of Jellyfish.com

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish.com>

------
RyanMcGreal
> They totally din't see Google as a threat, till it had a huge market cap.
> (Don't be evil, was a joke?)

Does having a huge market cap automatically make a company evil?

~~~
dstein
Not automatically. But I think it would be easy to prove there's a correlation
between market cap and corruption.

~~~
antiterra
If it would be easy, then perhaps you should do it. Such a conclusion would
have a nice amount of academic value.

I imagine there are a large number of small and/or untraded businesses with
dishonest or illegal practices. Perhaps data would even show that larger
market cap indicates corruption is less likely, depending on your measurement
for corruption?

------
TheCondor
A buddy and I were drinking months back, and for whatever reason (most likely
several beers was the reason) he misinterpreted the Bing and Facebook
arrangement that was made for "Facebook is buying Bing."

Completely un-Microsoft, I can't see it happening but if it did.. Damn that
could make things interesting.

Bing is interesting, it's a great attempt. The problem is Microsoft, so long
as they're running it and setting the "standard" for it, it's going to be a
failure. It's not going to knock Google off their perch. It's just not. And
anything less than that will be a failure. Cut that team and product free,
hand it over to like a facebook? IBM went through some similar stuff, MS
should be spinning stuff out, if their current phone effort fails again to
live up to their hype, they should just cut that group free too, let them go
and be successful. that stuff creates new industries which in turn create new
opportunities for everybody, including MS. Let Bing or Bing + FB cultivate an
army of guys that want to get rich and can control their own destiny, the
output will be far more interesting

------
arihant
But what if Bing uses Microsoft's Facebook ties to bring social to search?
Isn't that the root of "Google is scared by social" thing that's going on?

A lot of times when things seem to be dead, they are on the edge of killing
everything else.

------
rjhackin
I am not sure about the death of Bing, Bing has momentum and they should take
it forward and not lose ground. Competition is important to bring the best out
of technology.

------
rebelidealist
Would you consider likealittle.com a startup?

The definition of a startup is company with a limited operating history and a
company is an organization aimed at making profits.

------
tedsbardella
The web site he is promoting is very creepy.

------
rorrr
> _Bing was extremely lavish in compensation, making offers to the best
> hackers for $90K/year_

Is this a joke?

~~~
aChrisSmith
No. Remember the article talked about poaching students right out of college.
$90k a year isn't much for an experienced developer, however right out of
college (and at the time) that was 10-20k more than they could expect joining
another company.

~~~
rorrr
"experienced hackers" and "students right out of college" are quite different
in my world view.

------
franklindholm
Is this written in English?

------
dvfer
Bing is not really providing anything more than google's service. It only
shows "big company's" routine of trying to drive others out of business. Death
for Bing.

~~~
parfe
I disagree. I remembered Bing's decision engine commercials when looking for a
plane ticket. Turns out that Bing is way better for flights than Google is, by
far. Just try typing New York City to Los Angeles into both search engines.
Bing finds what you are after and Google does not.

~~~
kami8845
I prefer how Google handles that search query. If you're looking for a flight
does entering 'fly' after your two destinations really hurt that much? 'to' is
-more often than not - a pretty meaningless keyword, and I'm pretty sure most
people don't want half of what's above the fold to be taken up by flight
information if all they enter is a very general 'New York City to Los
Angeles'.

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parfe
It's not just the flight specific widget bing has, but the fact is
consolidates several sites worth of data into a single interface. On Google
you don't get a unified view of data. The ticket vendor is not important to
me. It's only the flight cost and number of stopovers that matter, which
google does not help with.

