Bill Gates On Google: "Bing Is The Better Product"

Bill Gates On Google: “Bing Is The Better Product”

Feb 11, 2013 at 8:12pm ET by Matt McGee

Photo by ToddABishop via Creative Commons.

It’s been more than four years since Bill Gates worked full-time at Microsoft, but he’s still promoting Bing, the company’s 3+-year-old search engine.

Gates, who’s still serving as Microsoft’s non-executive chairman but is focused full-time today on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, promoted Bing during an “Ask Me Anything” conversation today on Reddit. It happened when Reddit user “Fozzy420″ asked Gates, “Do you guys really use Bing? I mean seriously…” That prompted this Gates reply:

Seriously Bing is the better product at this point. Try the challenge. I am biased but the work to make Bing better has been amazing.

Gates didn’t really answer the question about which search engine he uses. The “challenge” he’s referring to is Bing It On, Bing’s effort to woo new searchers by doing side-by-side search results comparisons against Google. That’s been going since last September. After about a month, Bing announced that 33 percent of Google users said they plan to use Bing more often after taking the challenge.

Which search engine is better is a subjective debate, but the majority of searchers continue to vote by using Google. Bing has made small-but-consistent gains since its launch, but still commands only about 16 percent of US search market share and far less in worldwide market share.

(tip via BGR)

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Top News

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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JLishere

Bill Gates: How to lose credibility in 5 words or less.
http://twitter.com/21tigermike Michael A. Robson

Bing is alright, but nothing is as bad as Baidu (especially for English queries).
macseotips

Seriously, Bill? Bing’s query handling abilities – once you start using 4 or more word sequences – are a JOKE and produce hideously irrelevant, unrelated results in the top 10 and beyond.

But perhaps even sadder is the SEO community’s complacency about truly evaluating Bing’s strengths and weaknesses. No one seems to look up from their Google microscope obsession to deeply analyze who Bing prioritizes as Authority sites, what on and off-page factors are central to it’s view of the web.

How much more of the internet’s content, how many more domains need to get shoved into Google’s post-Penguin and de-indexed graveyard before the community stops treating Bing like a news-byte afterthought?
http://twitter.com/jwdlatif Jawad Latif

Though I’m running a CPC campagn on Bing but personally I never used Bing.
http://twitter.com/tanestis Θεοφάνης Ανέστης

Every time a do a query on Bing, I’m blowm away by how Google is a supperior produit.
http://twitter.com/mktgdesign The Marketing Design

You know what Bing is hands down better at? There mobile app / search. Try it. For most of the things I search for mobility (locally specifically) you get much better results, a cleaner design and a better looking homepage.
Justin Sous

Matt you changed your author image??
Matt McGee

No, that’s Bill Gates up at the top, not me. ;-)
Matt McGee

We’re a site that covers search engine news. If we missed something specific to that, feel free to let us know. We always welcome tips from readers.
Paul Turner

Hmmm this is surprising of him to say, next he will be saying Windows 8 is better than Windows 7…
Paul Turner

Lol so we are not allowed an opinion…?
Paul Turner

Quote: No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
Date: 1981
http://www.website-governance.com/ Robert Jacoby

If you say it enough times it comes true?
http://twitter.com/BobMeinke Robert Meinke

And personal wealth is the most important indicator of credibility. Which is why Donald Trump is always taken so seriously.
http://twitter.com/LocalSearchHQ Local Search HQ

Yes, really. Many Small or local businesses reports that Bing has been gaining in the search market over the last two months
http://www.nathanielbailey.co.uk/ Nathaniel Bailey

I think your find JLishere was talking about his credibility with searchers, webmasters and the general public etc, not the banks lol

Also how can you guarantee how much money someone has in their bank account? Have you been committing fraud or don’t you understand what the word “Guarantee” means?
fuckyou

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9101699/The_640K_quote_won_t_go_away_but_did_Gates_really_say_it_
welcome to the internet
fuckyou

did you actually read the IAmA?
http://twitter.com/JobBasketUK Job Basket

Comical.

Bing crawls one of our websites aroun 1/20th the amount Google does which gives it less data to index / rank us .. how can this ever benefit the end user?
http://profile.yahoo.com/VSRGYCL4GJCLQGSUM5K2S7DYXI Timothy

my roomate’s mom makes $67 every hour on the internet. She has been
fired from work for 6 months but last month her pay was $19184 just
working on the internet for a few hours. Here’s the site to read more View More
http://www.facebook.com/snkenji Kenji Sano

This is the Tom Green show, This is the Tom Green show, this is my favorite show because it is my show.