Microsoft has disabled an option to set Google as the default search engine on its latest Lumia Windows Phones. The option is currently supported on the majority of Nokia’s Lumia devices, thanks to an advanced setting in Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 8.0. Microsoft acquired Nokia’s phone business in April, and the company’s first handsets, the Lumia 630 and Lumia 930, are shipping without the option on Windows Phone 8.1. Microsoft has never allowed Windows Phone users to alter the physical search button behavior, which defaults to Bing, but Internet Explorer users could enable the setting to use the address bar to search within Google instead of manually navigating to the search engine or using the Bing default.
Oh my god Microsoft give it up already.
Bing has already happened. Bing is not far from 20% of the market in the US (something like 18% at the turn of the year) and Microsoft has deep, deep pockets.
Still, this anti-competitive streak of theirs is obviously never going to end no matter how many anti-trust suits they have to settle or get fined for.
Nobody cares about US market share. World market share is what matters. Apple always does the same trick to make themselves seem more important.
Worldwide, Bing, despite so much marketing and money, is at 5%. Even Yahoo is more popular.
Yahoo uses Bing
Competition is good. Basically everybody has given up. When DuckDuckGo is mentioned you hope it succeeds, when it is Bing you hope it doesn’t. This basically makes you a hypocrite.
Bing in the US is different. It actually has many features that aren’t available international so it is worth mentioning seperately. Worldwide Bing is only interesting because of the image search that seems better than Google’s And because at least it offers an alternative
Now allowing another search engine as the default is a bad move. If you read the article and the comments you would actually see that Microsoft didn’t do this though, so you basically fell for a bogus article.
Actually, when I turned on my 1020 for the first time it was already set to Google Search because it synches this setting from my Microsoft Account. How nice is that?
I’m not hoping Bing doesn’t succeed. I’m hoping Bing succeeds by being *better*, not by being *forced*.
“Oh my god Microsoft give it up already.”
Yeah, that sounds like you want them to succeed.
Also, source article has been updated. It is now even less clear to me what is going on. Apparently the option IS disabled on some new 8.1 phones, but it is unclear if this is done by Microsoft or some carriers.
I am just guessing here, but what if this is the Windows Phone equivalent of “Windows with Bing, for free”. I thought every OEM would get Windows Phone for free (sub 9 inch screen) and the normal Windows with Bing would still allow you to change the search provider though, so this wouldn’t really make sense
…I am confused
You realise there’s a link in there, right? “Stop trying to make it happen”.
(I am getting a http://xkcd.com/386/ feeling, so although I will read any reply I will not write one anymore)
Yes, I saw the link. So in your words and with those words it becomes:
“Oh my god Microsoft give it up already”. “Stop trying to make Bing happen. It’s not going to happen.”
That doesn’t change anything at all. It still means that you say that Microsoft should give up on Bing because it is not going to happen. I don’t understand how to make sense of that when you also mention that you want them to succeed and already have quite a large market share (just not Google-sized).
Also, that image is a cultural reference to making a certain word “a thing” (not the actual product). Given your background in languages I assume you know that. Microsoft is not trying to make the word BING a thing. It always talks about the product (they don’t say “Bing it”)
Finally, from this article it seems that 30% from the Worlds (not USA) searches go through Bing. And that is from an article that is questioning the validity of Bing vs Google results: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2299447/Validity-of-Bing-It-On…
No, it means that Microsoft should stop doing what this article is all about, i.e., forcing Bing upon users. That’s what the scene from Mean Girls is about: trying to force something to become “a thing”.
Unlikely.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid…
Edited 2014-07-15 13:04 UTC
Yeah, I also thought the 30% worldwide was unlikely and that is indeed not the case. Either the person who said that was adding the US numbers for Bing and Yahoo (18+11) and confusing the US with the entire world, or he was counting Baidu as using Bing (which is only true for English results)
I also just noticed that you wrote “give it up already” instead of “give up already”. I didn’t notice because, just like you, I am Dutch so this made sense to me (geef het op). But in English “give it up” as 2 very different meanings (1: cheer, 2: sex) and both are not what you meant
Uh…that’s a nice way of shooting yourself in the head.
Google Now, Siri and Cortana all have US-mostly or US-only features and that is not just because of the voice-recognition. Localisation is simply hard and requires a whole lot of resources that
This happens everywhere because of licensing issues or other reasons (Music services, DVD-regions, non-localized game content, non available hardware, etc)
but none of that explains why BING-search international is 5 years behind BING-search US. Maybe they would get that 20 or 30 percent market share internationally if they would make it work like the US version.
I hope Bing fails utterly because I hope the same thing for every single thing Microsoft has ever done. If that entire company and all their products vanished overnight I would be running through the streets screaming in joy.
Just wow.
Bing tracks you like Google.
DuckDuckGo does not.
You’re treating them like they’re the same thing just because they’re search engines. There is no hypocrisy when they’re complete opposites when it comes to privacy or track records.
You don’t know the definition of hypocrite.
When a huge company that fucks its customers offers a service to give itself more power he is against it.
When a small startup that tries to win customers by being useful offers a service he likes it.
Thom, don’t Yahoo and duckduckgo use Bing?
Which would sound impressive, if Bing wasn’t the default in 90+% of desktop and laptops shipped.
Back in the Internet Explorer 6 era, I assumed Microsoft would just put a search bar in Internet Explorer (similar to the one Firefox had), and easily grab 40% of the market.
But it didn’t happen when IE7 was released. Guess people are genuiely not interested in Bing. Be it the actual search results quality of Google Search or a subjective belief that Google Search is always better.
Edited 2014-07-15 12:15 UTC
What is more if you actually use it for awhile you find that its frankly nicer than Google. You get less SEO spammy results, the image search is waaay more accurate, the video search seems to hit what you are looking for more often than Google, frankly its just nicer.
Besides when did having actual free market competition come to be something that is booed and frowned upon? Hell I’d argue that if anything things have gotten too consolidated and when there was 3 major players there was more innovation as each scrambled to attract and keep users.
So if you haven’t tried Bing in awhile give it a go, if nothing else make it harder for the dataminers to build a profile on you by spreading things around. I have my forum mail going to Google, personal through Yahoo, and do searches through Bing…suck it dataminers!
Bing would be a much better offer than DuckDuckGo right? Right!?
The search results I get from Google have always been better than what I get from Bing. I think Microsoft has a long way to go before anyone other than Windows users with defaults will use Bing regularly.
I don’t notice much difference when I use both regularly. I prefer Google for text and Bing for images.
But when I am signed in to my Google account and only use Google for a while I notice that Google tailors its results better to me personally. You should do a test with and without “inprivate/incognito mode” to see just how customized the results get sometimes. I first noticed this on a shared device (iPad) that my wife had used for a couple of weeks. Many search results were really bad (for me) until I signed out from her Google Account and cleared the browser cache/history/cookies.
It used to be this way for me, but now I find myself trapped in the Google filter bubble unless I search from a private browsing window. When Bing searches on my Windows Phone started becoming more relevant than Google searches on my computer, I knew something was wrong.
To be fair, Bing also gradually develops a filter bubble, but in my limited experience it’s not as aggressive as Google’s. Then again, that could be because I’ve been using Google on the same account since 2005, whereas I’ve only been using Bing on a somewhat regular basis since 2011.
For me the filter bubble seems to have catched on to the fact that I’m generally not interested in rumours and celebrity news and fashion and stuff. Whenever I search online for things the majority of time I’m searching for things related to hardware, programming, “how does it work” or Wikipedia and these kinds of websites and articles are always amongst the top results even if I did happen to use a search-term that’s more in the average user’s range.
Though, I do have to say that it may just all be cognitive bias and I may only be paying attention to what I am interested in. I would also like to be able to configure this search bubble or disable it altogether in addition to being able to use more SQL-like search terms, but alas…
The problem with being trapped in the bubble, at least for me, is that there are a few times that I’m researching something, say for a work of fiction, that is just close enough to my normal realm of interests that Google ends up returning what it thinks I mean, instead of what I really mean, to the point of leaving out keywords I explicitly typed.
For example, I’m working on a plot involving nanotechnology as it applies to medicine, with a heavy emphasis on where we might be in 20 or 30 years with it. Google seems to think I wouldn’t be interested in medical uses of nanotech, and instead points me towards articles and research about industrial nanotech, even when I explicitly search on medical terms.
Is this because in the past, any time I’ve searched for nanotech I’ve always leaned towards its use in improving circuits and embedded computing? Probably, and it’s both frustrating and fascinating that Google thinks it knows what I want better than I do.
Of course, this is easily bypassed by using a private browsing session, and I also find myself more and more leaning on two or three search engines at once to get the best possible range of results. It’s rare, but there are times that Bing will come up more relevant results, even when searching both engines in a private session.
Remember that “Bing it On” challenge? I did that once because I was genuinely curious.
All five of my picks were Google.
With that logic, shoulf DuckDuckGo desist too?
Does DuckDuckGo force itself upon anyone?
You are right, my bad, I confused DDGo wit G+, you know, that thing that Google is forcing on its users.
G+ is there, but Google is NOT forcing it on its users in anything approaching the way that Microsoft is forcing Bing on Lumina users. Bing will struggle to remain at 5+ percent of the world market as Microsoft desperately forces it on their relatively small Lumina user base.
The problem with Bing is that compared to Google it’s light years behind in nearly every meaningful search category. If it weren’t, if it were on a more equal footing with Google, it wouldn’t have to resort to stunts like locking its Lumina users into Bing only searches..
If you can’t win on a level playing field, then build a tiny walled garden and tilt the playing field to your advantage. New Lumina users hopefully won’t notice or won’t really care..
We dissagree.
People who love or defend Bing, or want it to succeed never cease to astonish me.
I’ve been trying to use Bing for the past five years. I’ve run up to 200 search queries in it. Here are the results in comparison to Google.
1) Google always gives more relevant information.
2) Google actually finds information.
3) Google search index is approximately 5-10 times bigger than Bing’s, which means that less popular or uncommon information can be indeed found using Google, but not using Bing.
4) Google has an excellent morphology engine for every language that I’ve ever used, thus Google can find altered words, whereas Bing often cannot.
Out of 200 queries Bing has lost each and every time. Google always gives me what I’m looking for, Bing does that 10 times less often and its results are oftentimes totally irrelevant.
Bing is only good for finding top domains of popular companies. Bing oftentimes disregards Wikipedia articles on a subject I’m interested in (not totally, but Wikipedia articles are not on a first page of search results).
Thank you, but no thank you. Forcing an inferior search engine down on people’s throats will only mean less customers and a worse reputation for Microsoft.
The same could be said about people who do the same for Google…
Let me know when you get to 1000’s of queries.
As part of my job in IT I am constantly searching out some kind of information throughout the day. I have not found any problems or lack of results in Bing.
The points you made above are completely nonsense and sound more like fanboy facts then the bingers on this forum that you are attempting to call out. I rarely need to go to Google to compare results as I can always find what I need with bing.
Wow you really haven’t used bing much lately, if you had you would know how completely wrong your statement is. Sometimes the information I seek is not readily available so it comes from all over the net in small blogs or the like. Wikipedia not on the first page?? Search for Charlton Heston and tell me there is not a wikipedia summary right in the page.
I think you need to use bing more before you make such inaccurate comments and completely wrong points.
For the record I have no problems with Google search. I use it with an android phone. Bing I use on my Mac and Windows PC.
Yes, I really believe you. You have performed UP TO 200 search queries in 5 years. That is like …. 1 search per 9 days. You must be an expert by now. Such an expert that you can actually deduce the size of the search indexes by performing queries.
Here is a simple test: When I search for “Nederland” both Bing and Google provide me with excellent results. Bing shows nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederland as the first result and Google shows en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederland. (I am browsing from NL so Bing seems a tad smarter). Basically they give the same results on the first page. However, Google gives me a nice knowledge graph making it a winner for me.
When I switch to image search both give me lots of maps, flags and typical Dutch images. But Bing gives me tools for Size/Color/type/Layout/People while Google gives me “Dutch flag”/Landscape/Flag/Typical/Map making Bing the winner for me.
When I use Bing to search for “what is the best search engine” it actually puts up a direct link to duckduckgo.com while Google doesn’t list duckduckgo.com. Points for Bing for making me laugh
Both give good results, both are fast, both are free, both are available everywhere and both find me the information that I want. Please give me an example where it didn’t work for you. I am genuinely curious
Edited 2014-07-15 16:15 UTC
Last time they did that, an antitrust loss nearly forced them to split the company
NOT.
Who cares? Sadly, it doesn’t matter.
Apple, Google and Microsoft are all trying this same sort of ecosystem lock-in. Samsung is trying it with Tizen, except even fewer people use that than Windows Phone.
It’s surely evil all the way around. If I buy a device, I should be able to put whatever software I want on it, and run whatever software I choose on it.
Of course, if the courts couldn’t break Microsoft apart when they were convicted monopolists, how likely is it that the courts could solve this with this many players?
Meh.
Bad companies! Bad! No biscuit!