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There's yet another article on Slashdot claiming Bing's market share has barely budged despite ChatGPT being added to it, and initially being a big hit, yada-yada.
And yet barely 2 days prior, another article read, "Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find". I've been seeing those sorts of articles time and again over the last few months. I can't say whether that's true. I try to do as little as possible with Google nowadays.
I've actually been doing my searches through Bing for a few years now, using Edge (since it moved to the Chromium engine), and frankly, it's a rare occurrence where I can't find what I'm looking for within the first few results of a query. Generally if I can't find anything on Bing, Google really doesn't fare quantifiably "better".
And MS already has all the information it wants from me, if not through my search queries and browser telemetry, then through telemetry sent by the OS itself. If Google's search results truly are getting worse (not my claim), I'm not sure why they should still be in my life. Frankly if my data's gonna get collected anyway, I'd rather have one company have it then two. Especially when one of them is purely an advertising company (whereas the other is merely trying to move in that direction, despite failing repeatedly - and the company's very survival doesn't rely on its ad department).
Nobody it seems ever misses a chance to ridicule Edge or Bing. Laugh all you want, I'm actually rather happy with how it's working out for me.
Obviously, YMMV. So what say you? Are Google's results getting as unusable as some claim? If so, why stick with it?
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Hmm, the Quote button doesn't seem to be working. Aanywaayy...
Are Google's results getting as unusable as some claim?
I have no idea; I've never used it.
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Hmm, the Quote button doesn't seem to be working.
I've noticed that...the button is there, clicking on it doesn't do anything except for removing the highlight. So, I've been manually copying and pasting, and then adding a ">" before the pasted line.
The hamsters must be acting up.
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Are Google's results getting as unusable as some claim?
Yes. Very much yes when you are looking for specific information, or trying to recall an article you read a while ago. Their verbatim search used to be the bees knees, or however the saying goes. Even it sucks now. And has for about at least a year.
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If you've never used it why comment? Or is this some new nerd virtue signal?
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I'm a creature of habit. I've been using Google search so long, I forget Bing is there. I'm a Firefox guy for my browser. I find what I'm looking for so I'm not worried. Maybe if you're searching eccentric stuff it matters. But for boring stuff like "Where to buy a 16" husky chainsaw" Google does just fine for me.
Hogan
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I use Vivaldi as my main browser, and Firefox for some other stuff (its Facebook container is its main selling point to me). Yesterday I checked the memory footprint between them. Vivaldi - 106 tabs, 5.5 GB. Firefox: 10 tabs, 4 GB. This is in line with every time I've checked memory usage in the past. For some reason FF just sucks it up a lot more. Maybe the extension are heavy, although I only have three.
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Interesting. I'm 6 tabs deep in FF with only 1.5Gb of memory used. Opened up Facebook and it brought me to 2Gb. So not too big of a deal to me. Maybe I just do boring stuff with my machine.
Hogan
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I don't know. It has been an issue every time I've looked at Firefox, seemingly into the distant past.
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I'm using Chrome. I have six windows open, with a total of about 150 tabs open. Current memory usage is at 572 MB. YMMV
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That is great memory usage. To me, its crazy to have 150 tabs open. I could never work that way. I open and close tabs often. Its my goal to know what is on every tab when using my computer or close them. When I'm researching something, I might go crazy and have 30 tabs open, but I work quickly to either decide the information is useful, or close it.
Hogan
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I agree with that.
Besides keeping it straight in the head, what does 150 tabs even look like in the UI?
I should note I don't use tabs at all. I open a new instance for each.
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I have six windows open for different categories (personal, work, training, etc.) and within each, I use tab groups quite a bit. Most of the open pages are work-related and is the kind of stuff that I might need later today or two weeks from now, but hunting the pages down would be a big pain in the butt (our internal file-sharing and job tracking systems are a bit of a mess...but getting better). I suppose I could switch to creating lots of bookmarks instead, but since Chrome got their act together on memory management, it doesn't seem to be a real issue for me.
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In case you want to look into it Windows allows for multiple desktops. Key press to switch between. So for example personal could be on one and work on another.
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Many Chromium-based browser does that - it is called suspended page. When I go back to it, it loads again. It is a bit annoying, except when you play music from one of those pages - till it gets suspended.
I use a 32 bit W7 box, there is no HTML 5 browser running all pages living other than the good old trusty IE 11. It is funny when you have a MS product to showcase as a memory-conscious application.
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Maybe if you're searching eccentric stuff it matters. But for boring stuff like "Where to buy a 16" husky chainsaw" Google does just fine for me
Most of my searches is for formal API documentation (where IntelliSense isn't enough and I need more details).
The rest is rather generic. But it's been established I'm not the typical "consumer" whose only use for search engines is to buy crap. Had a long thread about this a few months back.
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I think Bing is and was always the better choice to search the MS docs.
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...and it probably still is the better choice, when compared to using the docs page's own search...
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Your use case 'Where to buy a 16" husky chainsaw' maps 1:1 to Google's use case of showing the most possible targeted ads. I think the decline of Google search is related to the searched things you don't want to buy.
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(All) AI "search" is patronizing. If it only makes a few hits, it keeps regurgitating them until it has a few pages of "content". Quantity over quality ... cause it can't tell the difference.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Rarely use Google. Brave browser, duckduckgo search engine, and some duck.com email.
Contrarian/curmudgeon here. 
>64
There is never enough time to do it right, but there is enough time to do it over.
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1 the scale of numbers measuring share of search are so high that to nudge any change is a lot of effort, but I also find it annoying when say things like only 5% of a market, but that 5% is 100m plus of revenue, dwarfing whole companies so.
things like it default on android and safari browser makes for a massive audience.
and then person writing an article is already in a niche segment so their usage will be massively different to the billion plus using the internet daily.
Yes bing search runs when using start menu now, but how many office works in total do not use start menu search to open an application. When in the echo of IT work, simple things like ctrl+c sound obvious, but there multiple dev I work with being under 30 that like oh neat trick 🥲
Is google search getting worse, maybe
is the expectations of people and bad search words and the ache of the amount of website and data out there and balancing new vs old and many parameters skewing the results.
question where the writer of any article is coming from, your experience and expectations
Javascript is a great thing for dead weight legacy and what good to use now. TextContent or innertext, still requires some sifting of mozilla docs or stackoverflow hoping that top answer marks oh, its past 2017 stop using that old way, use this, but then that "new" post become outdated and looks just as good as the 2014 post saying to use the other way because has a million linked articles
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Absolutely agree. Years using Bing (and Edge) and both work very well. The interface if Bing is better for my taste and even if it shows ads, they are a less agressive tha Google's. By the way I am no fan of Google and I prefer not to use any of its apps, including Gmail.
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I stopped using Google products a couple of years ago, excepting Gmail (can't find a client I like better for organization). Before I stopped using Google search, I was getting irritated with ads and it seemed like the results were always targeted.
Today I use DuckDuckGo and Bing. Both work sufficiently well for my needs, although MS pushing their version of ML is beyond irritating, as I don't have a need for the hallucinations of a computer. Just search results.
I thought about it, and I trust Microsoft more than I trust Google.
On a trust scale of 1 to 1,000,000 I rank Google a 1 and Microsoft a 2, so trusting MS more than Google is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
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I prefer DuckDuckGo, but Bing used to be reasonable. The addition of the ChatGPT style answer system to Bing has made it completely unusable for me. I thought 75 baud text rendering died in 1981 when 300 baud became the norm.
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