For general searches (looking up websites, searching for names of places, etc) Bing did fine. I found what I needed and most of the time the site I was looking for was among the first few results, as the case tends to be with Google searches. For technical content however, I quite often found that what I was looking for wasn’t on the first page. Upon looking the same query on google, I’d find a much better results set, especially with niche topics, such as the Player-Stage robotics studio that I have been developing with. For such topics, Google far outshone Bing in my experience.

The one place Bing does great however, is images. Bing’s image search page uses ajax to allow you to keep scrolling down for more images, and they are loaded up as needed. This reduces the need to jump from page to page, as is the case with Google image search. Like Google searches, Bing has some filters that can be used to narrow your search down. It also has, -unlike- Google, some recommendations relevant to the type of search. For example, if you search for “Jay-Z” under images, it offers you a list of “related people” that is fairly accurate in the searches I performed. Whether this is actually useful to you or not largely depends on what you use image searches for.

Bing's related people

When you click an image, Bing has a similar frame to google where it shows you the page, except that it keeps the scrollable list of images on the left side as thumbnails. So you can quickly select a different image if you want without needing to go back and forth as you tend to do with Google image searches. This was a huge timesaver for me.

Finally, there is the main search page. For Google, it is a simple search box that exemplifies minimalist design. In the other corner is Bing, which shows you a beautiful (in most cases) image in the background, with tags on the image showing interesting facts about it. In developing nations with bandwidth and latency issues, it will be much faster to load up the Google home page. However, for me, with an ADSL 2 connection, the difference is barely noticeable. In addition, I don’t often use the actual search homepage. I prefer to search from the location bar /search box in whichever browser I’m using, and I’m sure there are many people in the same camp. Also, with the image tags, how many people sit there on the Bing homepage reading the info tags before searching? I’d be interested in seeing some statistics on that.

All in all, I’m going to stick to Google for general searches, since I mostly search technical content and it does well on the general stuff too. I will be using Bing search for images though, I find it much more suitable for that. Your results may vary, but I think everyone should at least give Bing a fair trial. You might find it to be a better browser for you.

On a side note, one browser specific quirk I noticed for firefox was that if I type a word into the location bar, say “facebook”, it would show me the Bing results for “facebook”, with the actual facebook page as the top result. Previously with google as my built in search engine, it would use the best result from google that it could find, thus sending me straight to the facebook homepage if I just typed “facebook” in the location bar.

• Bing And Google
• Bingle
• Bing vs Google

I liked the first two, but I’m not a big fan of Bing vs.Google, because scrolling in one pane would cause the other pane to scroll too. I don’t know if that’s just a Firefox bug or a local problem to me, but it didn’t happen with options 1 & 2. Either way, if you want side-by-side comparisons, you can go crazy with these. As I’ve said before, I don’t agree with the idea of choosing a search engine based on a few random searches.

Search results on Bingle

So, to rectify this injustice, I’m going to switch to using Bing exclusively for 2 weeks, and I’ll see if I’m happy with it. It seems like a fair trial of its abilities.

Bing as the firefox default search provider

But I’m not just going part Bing for searching, I’m going the whole nine yards. I’ve changed my default search provider to Bing, my homepage to Bing and even my location bar search in firefox to Bing. Basically, if I type a word into the location bar in firefox, it uses Bing to find it instead of the default Google. This is a fairly big step for me, as pretty much every part of my workflow uses a google product. From Gmail to Google Calendar to Google reader. So switching away form Google search is a big change, and Bing will have to be really good for me to stick with it from there on.

I’ll update at the end of these two weeks on how it went.