I use Bing a fair amount and I like it.

I'm wondering if you could elaborate on what sorts of things you are trying to find and having trouble with. Perhaps HN could make a few suggestions for how to get more out of your Bing experience.

I've tried switching to it but for looking up code and projects it kinda sucks. Even when I throw hints at it sometimes it just doesn't seem to care. I'm using DuckDuckGo instead for now.

It’s a matter of taste but I prefer the Apple/google clean and white UI with little else distraction than what you are trying to achieve over Microsoft’s “portal from the 90’s/let’s fill every bit of space”. Whether it’s bing or Windows, something as stupid as showing you a different background picture every time means you always have to deal with a new visual, which means more effort to find your way. It’s the same for IE and edge, the default new tab is to show you a busy page with news, weather forecast, most visited stuff. That’s like advertising banners to me.

I’m surprised to learn an it professional regularly finds their way to a search engine home page. I would assume you’d just type your query directly into the address bar? This seems to work for every major browser at least, unless I’m mistaking?

I actually use Bing, and I see the oddity that is their homepage once a month, if that.

(And I think bing is fine for about 80% of searches. The rest I use google, which manages for another 10%, and for the remaining tithe I have to do something archaic like think about how to properly format a search query. Party like it’s 1999.)

Why are you going to Bing’s homepage? The rest of the site is minimalist.

Bing's video search (particularly for porn) is the best in the business.

> (particularly for porn)

I had not considered Bing a serious competitor to Google's search engine until now.

>> (particularly for porn)

> I had not considered Bing a serious competitor to Google's search engine until now.

I can’t tell how much humor was intended here, but that’s a serious competitive point that had not occurred to me. Ever. It’s not something that MS could use in a marketing campaign, but could easily sway lots of people to give it a try when they otherwise wouldn’t.

I'm not sure if it was implemented as a 'competitive point' or if Microsoft just has employees that solved the porn search problem for personal use.

Its image search is also pretty good. If I'm not successful on a google image search, bing usually comes up with quality images. Their maps also tend to better render local businesses and it's easier to navigate the results than google, surprisingly. On the other hand technical searches are way better on google.

That’s likely on purpose now, even if it was accidental in the beginning. Microsoft marketing people are not stupid, and they know the right amount of piracy and the right amount of porn is excellent marketing.

I find bing to be better than any other Google alternatives.

It would be possible for you and your parent comment to be correct simultaneously.

agree

It was also disappointing to hear recently one of their developers say that they mostly just copy what Google is doing to keep up.