The only thing you search for on Bing is Google.

Microsoft has for a long time been in the search engine business with numerous rebranding exercises – MSN Search (1998 – 2006), Windows Live Search (2006 – 2007) then Live Search (2007 – 2009) and finally Bing (2009 – present). Despite all the time and money Microsoft has poured into its search engine Google still has 3 times the number of of the search engine market share as Bing. This is even with Satya Nadella backing it, it being the default search engine on Windows 10 and things generally improving.

So why is this? I once asked my driving instructor why he had quite a lot of students passing first time (with him), what was he doing that other driving instructors were missing. His answer was simple

I give honest, blunt feedback. If you forgot to check your mirrors, I don’t sugar coat it, I tell you.

This is one of the key parts of machine learning. You need have a feedback loop. It might work perfectly today, but what about tomorrow? How do you improve it? How is that going to work when you’ve got thousands of users? What about millions? What about billions?

You might think about putting in some web form so users can provide feedback. This is a dumb idea. Twitter does this for ads and I can honestly say I just randomly pick reasons, I don’t care, I just want the ad to disappear because it has annoyed me.

So what is the answer? Simply put, I think its Google Analytics. Most websites have it enabled and why not? Its free, it provides highly valuable insight into your website and its simple to setup and use.

From Googles point-of-view, its a win-win, they know how popular your site really is, it doesn’t matter if you’ve found the site via Bing or any other search engine, if the site got Google Analytics enabled,  Google knows and it knows what keywords got the end-user to the site. It also knows how long a user spent on the site and if they hit the sites target – ie did they buy anything.

Google Analytics is Google feedback loop.