You said:

"The writer points out that since the article was written Vole has fixed it"

No, he doesn't say anything of the sort - the closest he gets is suggesting it might be accidental. And Matt is basically correct - you get roughly the same results depending upon the exact search terms used.

Since "Why is Windows so expensive?" now returns articles about how Bing is biased and all, and no longer returns alleged "Why is Mac so expensive", I tried some other search phrases from which I discovered a few interesting results. Here's one of them:

I tried searching "Why is Windows so crappy?" on both Bing and Google.

On Google, the top result is "Windows is Crap" (www.joelcomm.com/windows_is_crap.html) Some random frustrated Windows user ranting about the bug-ridden OS.

On Bing, the top result is a page titled "Why Windows Still Beats Linux" (www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/5299). Incidentally, the author of the article also happens to be author or co-author of Windows books such as "Windows Vista in a Nutshell", "Windows XP Power Hound", and "Windows XP Cookbook".

Also, another thing (which I find VERY interesting) is that the page DOES contain one incidence of the word "crappy", towards the very bottom of the page, in the comments section as a reply of a reply of a comment, in a completely different context than the intent of the search phrase.

"(...) If your server is going down everyday, then its probably because of a configuration problem that you havent solved or some crappy no-name software that you put on it. (...)"

Through this exercise, I'm also convinced that either: 1. Search on Bing is biased towards MS, or 2. Bing's search engine is inferior to its contemporary counterparts. In either case, I wouldn't use Bing.

Trying that "Why is Windows so expensive?" search phrase in that Bingdings (from a German IP) offered to elucidate me about "Why is OSS Commercial Software So Expensive?"
I guess the dynamic duo from the ubiquitous Redmondian monopolist thinks Germans need re-education about open source software.

I have to agree with Minotaur: why trust Google? Both companies are trying to extend and maintain a world-wide dominance and that is nothing you can do without crushing someone else's toes.
It's just so that Google's centrepiece is its search engine. Once "all our data are belong to them", they probably won't give a damn whether their results are viewpoint-neutral either.
Personally, I've stopped paying much attention to the "don't be evil" motto quite early this millenium.

The most evil companies are Google and Apple. I would much rather see Microsoft at the top than any of those two.

Everyone seems to be jumping to the conclusion that Microsoft made this deal with Yahoo so that they could force Windows servers running "Bing" on Yahoo and the world.

However, Bing seems to be running on (or at least cached by) Linux:

telnet www.bing.com
Trying 24.244.3.56...
telnet: connect to address 24.244.3.56: Connection refused

curl -I 24.244.3.56
HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
Server: AkamaiGHost
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 187

(AFAIK, Akamai's servers run Linux).

Perhaps Microsoft made the deal to adopt Yahoo's superior search engine and is using Akamai's (or Yahoo's) more reliable Linux servers, and then just painted the word "Bing" on the pages and tried to hide the server type??? That would be a kind of an interesting development: an admission of the failure of Microsoft vs. open source.

Perhaps some hacker types can investigate this further?

I tried to search in Bing for: change windows to linux. Thanks for your contribution to this world Bill.

I just did some tests and I see no evidence that Microsoft is manipulating the results for nefarious purposes. For example, try searching for "Apple is evil", without quotation marks. The first result is a link to the official Apple website, even though the word evil does not appear on that page. If Microsoft was secretly manipulating the results, it stands to reason that the first result of this search would be an anti-Apple website, not the official Apple site!

The Apple website appeared at the top of the search, even though the word "evil" is not on the site, because other sites with the word "evil" have links to the Apple website. I did some other searches calling random things "evil" that yielded similar results. Note that adding quotation marks to the search changes this behavior.

This whole thing is just an example of extremely shoddy journalism on the part of PC World.

We better ask the US Government about that one ;) Where do you honestly think they make most of there money from? At least Google is more open to everyone than MS was and the information is kept online :D No more back-door snooping required. Next step Google apps in your brain ;) sounds like a joke, but go see what they are researching :)

Lol, lol, lol!
Learn to spell, idiot!

@Webster:

Hi Steve! I know you are intentionally mis-spelling your company name to camouflage your blogging efforts. Or you are just another illiterate CEO. Either way, "intensely disliking", or "hating" a company which subverts the legal system, destroys other companies on a whim, and uses money thus gained to force itself down consumers' throats is no crime, it is a response to the corporate crimes committed by your company. Suck it up.

Before you hate someone, think about it first. hating is a crime if you don't know.

I am tired of all of the lies about microsoft. This one is just an example of millions. Miscrosoft is simply one greatest bussiness founded by one of greatest people in our era. I am very proud of them.

I consider Microsoft the most pernicious monopoly in the history of US business practice. I would like to see a class-action against them and a claim for multiple trillions in damages, and I believe there are terabytes of evidence on-line to substantiate it.

That said, I just found The Inquirer because I finally got around to my "Check out and Compare Bing" todo list item. So far, to my surprise, I must admit they seem to have done a pretty good job, and they are formatting the results in a cleaner and more useful way than Google does.

As for the premise and supposed evidence provided by your article, I'm going to be gentle and describe it as "sophomoric". Do you seriously believe that someone at Microsoft would go to the trouble to block or tamper with a query like: "Microsoft is Evil"? How many variations of equally puerile commentaries would they have to filter in order to succeed in this 'plot'?

But I decided to check out your premise anyway, only instead of adopting language drawn from Star Wars, or Stargate for my query, I tried this:

'monopoly microsoft "anti-trust" violation'

My subjective appraisal of the results gives a strong edge to BING. It reported a total of 678000 hits, vs. 12,000 by Google (although I don't consider that particularly significant). Much more importantly, I found substantially more references in the first 20 from BING that appeared to be useful and from credible sources than I did in the same top-20 from Google.

That doesn't mean I believe that Microsoft has redeemed itself for 20-years of deliberately shipping defective software, exploiting it's customers and using it's monopoly to destroy competitors. It just means that if I ever get the chance to join a class-action to blow a hole in their ill-gotten gains over those 20 years or so, I intend to use BING at least as much as Google in order to dig up the evidence.

it's "bizspark" not "bizpark". If you spell it right, microsoft.com/bizspark is the first result. If you spell it wrong, you have both other people and search engines wondering what the heck 'bizpark' is.

Try searching for "bizpark".

Google does not report:
microsoft.com/bizpark in the top 20 results even though it is the main landing page for the product.

Google does the same with many other products. With 75% market share, Google manipulation impacts everyone a lot more.

I search "Why do macs"
BING= why do macs suck in the top 3 results
GOOGLE= why do macs work so well in the first 3 results

try it yourself its funky

Did anyone really think they would get an unmanipulated & unfiltered stream of raw information from Microsoft through any of their corporate owned sources? If so, I know of some Nigerian entrepreneurs who would love to talk to you about some moneymaking opportunities.

I've got exactly what the article says/reads lol. I think Google IS better than M$ Bing crap. But is an alternative at least!

Neat, when I search Google vs. Bing in Google, I get the following site:

http://www.bing-vs-google.com

When I put the same search into Bing, I get:

http://www.google-vs-bing.com

When searching for the strings "IE vs Firefox", "IE vs Safari", etc. Bing's first entries are links to the Internet Explorer Home Page.

I ran the first couple searches, and didn't get those results. I'm not a Windows guy, but there's not sense in lying about them.

So I tried the usual Microsoft stuff... but that didn't really raise any concern. Maybe they had removed the narcissism filtering...

But then I thought, what if I were an unintelligent American?

"Why should I buy an Ipod" on Bing.
Curious... if you add the "?" at the end of the sentence you get the same results as Google... while without it... WOW... An entire page of search results for why NOT to buy an iPod.

It's kinda nice to know that they are filtering the information for us isn't it? Afterall, obviously Microsoft knows best... Anyone know where I can get an MS-DOS Tattoo?

PC World never write any good about Microsoft. Probably just like the auther of this post.

I don't what kind of argument is that: do you see any body in the world would ask a question like why windows is so expensive? the question does very well application mac computers.

Does the author have a brain or just another Microsoft hater?

Did you read the article before you decided that the writer must be biased? The writer points out that since the article was written Vole has fixed it. Farrell is more known for his pro-microsoft line and anti OSX

hey regulas - you are not alone!
i suffer the same OS purely for gaming

someone please make a new OS for gaming only!!!

This article is incorrect.
I ran the same searches with Google and Bing right next to each other. Guess what, they had links to the same articles and links. A search of "Apple" on Bing gives the apple web site listed first, on Google the first thing listed is the link to the Apple store the second link is to the Apple home page. I'm sorry the author of this article is either anti Microsoft or pro Google but the facts do not support the statements.

Porn Vids

That is all...

I put up with MS and their Swiss Cheese OS to play my games and that's it. OS X and Linux and search with Google.
MS (we want to own and run everything) can kiss my backside.