Bing does seem to be on a slow upward trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...

It’s still only 6% of global search vs 86% for google.

I wonder how much of that is from dark patterns in Edge.

Do DDG searches count in Bing's percentage?

I thought that DDG used Yahoo! Search under the hood exclusively (because... why use more than one?). It turns out that it is a complex mix of resources from multiple partners[0]:

> In July 2016, DuckDuckGo officially announced the extension of its partnership with Yahoo! that brought new features to all users of the search engine, including date filtering of results and additional site links. It also partners with Bing, Yandex, and Wikipedia to produce results or make use of features offered. The company also confirmed that it does not share user information with partner companies, as has always been its policy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

One way to quickly find out what underlying provider a metasearch engine uses is to search for "my user agent". You will then normally see the user agent of the crawler in the result snippet.

Doing this on DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=my+user+agent&t=hk&ia=answer , reviles http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm in the snippet for whatsmyuseragent.org .

That's Bing anyway.

No inside knowledge, but it wouldn't make sense for Bing not to count searches from all of the below as part of their total number.

- DuckDuckGo

- Ecosia

- Qwant

- OneSearch

- Search Encrypt

- Swisscows

- etc.

Part of betting is about the payout. Had Bing bested Google, that would have had a significant impact on Microsoft stock price.

Horse racing is a better place to make the point. Risking your bets on likely winners has a low payout overall — underdogs have a reward that batter aligns with risk.

Horse racing has some really interesting mechanics not present here. The top three bets are win, place, and show. Win means the horse game in first. Place means it came in second OR first. And show means third OR second OR first. So one popular bet is to put money on the favorite to place or show. Even if an underdog wins the race, you still make some money. I don’t know of where else you have such mechanics.

Even more interesting is the Exacta and Trifecta bets, where you bet on order.

I worked with a pretty hardcore handicapper. He would plan for certain races for weeks and look at training and other factors. Basically, he'd cover the Saratoga meet and pair favorites a longshots and come out ahead enough to stay ahead. You could tell how well he did by the toys purchased in the Fall. Good year, a truck, bad year a laptop.

Personally I avoid everything Microsoft because of the many unfixed bugs in Windows. Bing is a fine search engine specially compared to desktop search but it reminds me to much of all the weird experiences.