Bing works pretty well most of the time. I switched my personal primary search engine to bing around the beginning of this year after noticing a marked degradation of Google search quality.
In fact, anecdotally, Bing is markedly better at narrow search results (quoted phrases, excluding or including specific words, etc).
Google on the other hand is significantly better at what I’d call fuzzy searches, where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for but have some vague idea (some esoteric spelling, or that type of apple that has unique properties but you can’t remember the name of, etc.)
I feel like I need to read the manual for specific Google searches. Sometimes, it seems to drop an important search term and not give a suggestion link to include it. +term doesn’t help sometimes. It seems like +”term” usually does.
It seems overfitted to delivering results with mass appeal. Perhaps I’ll try bing the next time I get that tingling feeling google will throw out the search terms intended to narrow down what I want to find.
They retired the + when Google+ used it to mark accounts or something. To require a term be verbatim in the result pages, just put it in “quotes”. The - however still works, afaik.
I've had to search stuff in bing because for some reason google had only the shitty mirror sites for github issues/stackoverflow/whatever indexed. I could literally do a quote search and not get the original source.
In fact, anecdotally, Bing is markedly better at narrow search results (quoted phrases, excluding or including specific words, etc).
Google on the other hand is significantly better at what I’d call fuzzy searches, where you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for but have some vague idea (some esoteric spelling, or that type of apple that has unique properties but you can’t remember the name of, etc.)