

A week without Google Search - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/week-without-google-search-bing-there.html

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jm4
Search engine preference depends, at least to a degree, on personal taste and
this guy is entitled to his opinions, but this seems a bit contrived. He
complains twice about a horizontal scroll bar when he's using what looks like
a very small window. Come on.

The complaint about wasted space is a little puzzling too because in the
screenshots it looks like both Google and Bing have about the same amount of
"wasted space". The difference is Bing has it on the left and Google has it on
the right.

The only gripe that seems legitimate is the image search and it's a bit of a
stretch to call the Bing results "irrelevant". The Google image results for a
"chi-square table" are clearly better, but some of the images on Bing are
similar or identical.

I'm very much interested in comparisons between Google and Bing. This might be
the toughest competition Google has faced so far and it's a great opportunity
for us to see where search engines can improve. This article, however, is a
lousy comparison. There's almost nothing of substance here.

I suspect it's a link bait article designed to plug the book that's
prominently displayed on the right side of the page. That's fine, of course,
but it's still a lame post.

~~~
iamelgringo
I've been using Bing as my browser default since it came out. By and large,
it's on a par with Google for most queries. I do find myself going back and
forth from Google search for programming questions because of the Google
groups search and blog search. The Python and Django Google groups are very
active, and quite helpful. I also have found a number of links to content on
programming questions via Bing that I wouldn't have found using Google alone.
So, I find myself using both search engines quite a bit.

I've been planning some recent travel and the airfare search on Bing was
excellent. Up until recently, Kayak was my primary airfare comparison site,
but Bing's tools won big for me. They felt a faster and more responsive. You
can also get airfare trend graphs and get "buy now prices increasing" or "buy
later, prices decreasing" recommendations. Bing is now my primary airfare
search tool.

Either way, it's great that Google is getting a little pressure to compete in
search. It's been the defacto monopoly for several years, and that's bound to
cause some stagnation. I think the competition is going to make search better
all the way around, and it's that reason that I'm going to keep Bing as my
browser default.

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warwick
I've also switched my browsers search bar over to Bing. Overall, I prefer it
to Google. Random notes:

\- Searching for Cocoa class names doesn't give me the API reference as the
first result. This is the one thing that's been annoying me.

\- The image search has a nifty infinite scroll thing going on. This makes
scanning through results quite a bit faster.

\- I like the picture, to the extent that I tend to visit the Bing homepage
just after midnight, even if I don't need to search. It's not utilitarian, but
it gives Bing a flavour Google is often lacking.

~~~
dragonquest
I agree. I often go to Bing atleast once a day to see what pic have they put
up. They have great taste specially when constrained to a limited size.

~~~
axod
Seriously? The picture is one of the main reasons I don't like it. I find the
google logo changes to usually be really interesting and clever, whilst the
selection of random clip-art at bing to be a bit crass, and distracting.

~~~
sp332
You can just turn it off with <http://www.bing.com/?rb=0> and on with
<http://www.bing.com/?rb=1>

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epi0Bauqu
Anyone care to try Duck Duck Go for a week and then send me some similar
feedback? We're very open to ideas.

~~~
vollmond
I'll give it a shot. First impression: Don't use "/" as your search box
shortcut. Interferes with Firefox's quickfind shortcut.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Thanks. The '/' binding is copying Google, which they use in their various
apps like Gmail.

~~~
vollmond
Ah. That does make some sense, then (I haven't used Google's shortcuts much).

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pmjordan
Apart from the trolling tone, the sole commenter suggests switching to the US
version which is supposed to be better. How would one go about that, then? I
didn't understand the hype about bing when first announced until I looked at
screenshots - for some reason the extra features seem to be US-only.

~~~
peripitea
Click on your country in the top right of the page; it will take you to a new
page where you can select your market.

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tybris
Google has grown less effective in many areas over the past few years. I
especially hate that it no longer includes all the words in the query, which
was originally one of the reasons for switching to Google. Yahoo and Bing are
a little stupider in that regard, which means they let the user be a little
smarter. No doubt, Google is king of the common query, but it should watch its
base. If people need to go to another search engine to find something hard
they might not come back for the easy stuff.

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fno
Try search.yahoo.com I find it quite good. In some nichees Yahoo is far better
than Google (won't mention them because I am a tinfoil hat privacy freak,
sorry). Also it seems to index XML (eg when used with XSLT) much more likely
than Google.

~~~
davidw
In terms of supporting someone else, I think Yahoo is better than Microsoft,
who I still don't trust all that much.

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lanceusa
Good article...seems to come down to visual preference for the author.

But...

To use BING because its not something else (Because It's Not Google) makes my
anti-anti self kick in and makes me not want to use it for the simple fact I'm
not 12 years old anymore. MS needs to grow up and just release good
groundbreaking innovative products like they've done for the development
world.

