Away from the Yagooglive search engines, there have been some recent changes in the search space.
Bing launched a while ago, but I’ve only just read from Anglian LUG that Bing is badly biased, returning pretty poor results for openoffice, vista and windows searches.
In the following discussion, Bev mentioned Quintura which looks like an interesting newcomer, but it’s so heavily javascript-requiring that I’m not going to use it every day. It made me think of a cross between Clusty and the now-dead SearchMe.
The other big noise lately has been the Wolfram Alpha but most of my search requests seem too esoteric for it.
As you may guess from the above, I’m still using Clusty as my main search engine (when something isn’t in my bookmarks or the ODP). What’s your favourite non-Yagooglive search?
When I first tried out Bing I thought for sure it would be biased, so I searched for “Microsoft sucks”
http://www.soggyblogger.com/blog/2009/06/not-bad-for-bing.html
I guess that was too obvious and they are more inconspicuous with their manipulations.
Bing is Live rebranded, which is now partnered with Yahoo, it’s not a new engine. Rather it’s the Yalive part of Yagooglive.
Live and MSN indeed both redirect to Bing now. Thanks for pointing that out. Yahoo gives rather less manipulated results than Bing, as far as I can see.
I wonder if “Microsoft sucks” is considered too extreme to be worth tampering with the results. If you’re that set against it, you’re not going to buy their stuff no matter what you find, are you?
But if they provide you with half-decent search results, you might still use Bing when you go looking for OpenOffice…
I think they need a bit more to substantiate a bias claim.
Sure “vista flaws” search is odd, but “flaws in Microsoft vista” is fine. Which suggests they haven’t directly tampered with the ranking, or index of pages, but it may simply be a figment of a poorly phrased search term.
I did a few searches, and nothing stands out especially suspect. Indeed the search quality is comparable to Google, and often results are almost identical to Google.
There are some things that differ curiously, ordering of “bad vista” results, but it looks to me more to do with subdomains, or site navigation, than bias.
As they say, never assign to conspiracy that which may adequately be explained by incompetence.
It’s not an academic study, but the fuller thread on the LUG list seemed pretty curious to me. I think you need a bit more than a few searches to claim “they haven’t directly tampered with the ranking”. 😉
As you note, that “vista flaws” search result is odd and I’m not sure what sort of incompetence would explain it. Surely fewer people type “flaws in Microsoft vista” as a search term because it is longer and it contains a stop word (“in”) that many how-to-search guides will tell you to leave out.
It’s a Yahoo-powered search engine, but I like (and still use) AllTheWeb.