Interestingly, bing of all things turns up better results than Google with the same search terms, first 3 blocks are "popular results", first is tutorial sites, second is w3 schools and third takes you to the current docs for functions and operators.

If you ignore those, the fourth result takes you to the current docs for comparison functions and operators. I'd prefer it taking you right to the official docs on the first result, but comparatively acceptable. It was memed to death but I've seriously found it more useful than Google these days, comparable to ddg's results.

[–] brisk@aussie.zone 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

DuckDuckGo uses Bing's results

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

Not all results, but yes.

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 8 points 5 months ago

Did not know that, for some reason I thought it was (or at one time was) based on Google's

[–] jnk@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you're going through that route, SearX beats everything and it's not even close. It's self hosted and takes search results from any engine you check in a config, different config for search categories, ... Rn I'm mostly getting results from brave, qwant, and duckduck. Gotta acknowledge the bing copilot tho, it's pretty decent, but requires to use edge or bing app in android, so i only use it when I'm lazy or I'm searching for something too obscure for searx.

[–] Vilian@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

SearX

i hate that name lol

[–] ObsidianNebula@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google's (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have a half thought that maybe bing works well for technical searches because it's the default search engine for edge and depending on the company, you may or may not be able to use a different browser and I'll be real, I tend to leave my work laptop setting as default as possible unless particularly awful.

[–] Vilian@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago

i read something a few years ago, that it was better, because bing don't have many users, so they couldn't rely on AI, and because everyone was using google, sites didn't optimize for bing SEO, not sure how much time it has, with microsoft obsession with AI