One thing about Bing: they offer developers free APIs for search and spelling correction. (http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/06/ruby-client-for-search-an...). I got a Google search API key in 2000, but they discontinued giving out keys.

But my god is it difficult to get an adcenter api key from Microsoft. But that's a completely different rant (why do all the major search engines make it so damn hard to spend money with them?).

Here is a short history of who has powered Yahoo's searches:

???? - 2001: Inktomi

2001 - 2004: Google

2004 - 2010: Yahoo

2010 - ????: Bing

It will be interesting to see who will power Yahoo after Bing.

I think the deal's for 10 years so it'll be a long time before we find out.

They really think Yahoo will last 10 years?

Yahoo is actually pretty popular with regular users in regards to news, mail, and other such things.

Yeah, they are dominating in webmail. Tech savvy users tend to think everyone switched to GMail but that's just not true.

Yahoo is number 1 or 2 for the most popular sport, tv, entertainment, etc...

Loads and loads of sites, Yahoo is more a content provider than anything or anyone else.

It helps that they lock in sweet contracts with DSL providers like SBC to provide email services.

Anyone know about what the technology stack is behind Bing? It would be interesting to know if MS uses their own .NET framework or if it is built on something else.

Bing uses a lot of Microsoft technologies including C# and .NET framework languages but as with many large services (or sets of services in this case) the components crawling, processing, indexing and serving content are written in a variety of languages including C, C++, etc and are managed by a myriad of tools languages that support features.

A little googling finds: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/fsharp-041...

"We’ve also seen fantastic applications in server-side data analysis, including in parts of the Bing ad delivery and analysis pipeline. F# seems a particularly good language for programmatic machine learning."

I think that is just one small part of the Bing system though.

That's Microsoft Research. There's no real direct pipeline from MSR to production.

Edit: To clarify, I know MSR is using F# in a lot more places than we are.

Parts of Bing are (were?) backed by Hadoop thanks to Microsoft's purchase of Powerset - all their NLP search technology ran on Hadoop.

I don't think this is true anymore... I think we're using COSMOS now? Maybe someone else wants to help me here.

I expect under the hood Bing is Azure.

Not much (the real-time Twitter results is one such piece). You have to remember that Bing predates Azure by many years. There is a lot of code/idea sharing though.

Azure is too new to be used by much in terms of internal MS. It's usually the other way around (other MS software is being used to power Azure).

It seems they still support their own "search grammar", though? For example link: - I don't think it works in Bing, and Yahoo was a lot more reliable than Google for this. Any alternatives?

One that I use is http://www.opensiteexplorer.org from http://www.seomoz.org (disclosure: you need a paid account to get the most out of it and we are business partners of SEOmoz).

RankChecker is still showing me different site positions in the Yahoo and Bing search results.

Shouldn't keyword rankings be identical if Bing is powering both?

Probably not. In fact, even Google returns different results for itself sometimes, depending on the servers your search request gets routed through.

Google also tailors its results for each user that's logged in based on their history. Idk if Bing does this.

What search engines are left now? I know there's Google, Bing, Cuil, and DuckDuckGo, but I'm drawing a blank past that.

Not to take anything away from the guys, but it is not fair to lineup DuckDuckGo aside Google, Bing and Cuil. It’s simply misleading, yes DuckDuckGo is an interface to search engines.

Actually, it is a hybrid. I have my own index and do my own crawling as well.

All this time I thought it was a fully independent search engine. Whoops.

http://yandex.com (Russian search engine) recently launched global English search.

There's the Chinese http://www.baidu.com/ .

There's the Korean Naver http://www.naver.com. Korea's daum http://www.daum.net English search results is also being powered by Bing.

DuckDuckGo is just an interface to Bing.

It's certainly more than that and I have a lot of code to prove it.