When you say that 93% of your searches have “absolutely nothing to do with shopping, travel, health, and local” that means less than 1 in 10 times you “search” online it doesn't fall into those categories… that's a lot of searching for technical information and classic cars!

I have to ask, though, when you say that 93% of your searches have “absolutely nothing to do with shopping, travel, health, and local” that means less than 1 in 10 times you “search” online it doesn't fall into those categories… that's a lot of searching for technical information and classic cars!

Last week, I went over to iGoogle after a long while and didn't really like it (again) so I decided to go back to the first such site I had seen, start.com, but it re-directed me to bing.com. At first I thought a virus had hijacked my page, but a couple of days ago, our development manager mentioned a decision engine called bing that microsoft had worked on that would give relevant results.

A colleague and I then sat at my computer and went to google (insert chuckle here) to get searched for the term “bing” (We both couldn't remember where we had come across the term.) We tried a few quesitions, and these are the results

http://www.bing.com/search?q=what+is+the+popula...
http://www.bing.com/search?q=who+is+the+preside...
http://www.bing.com/search?q=who+is+the+preside...
http://www.bing.com/search?q=what+is+the+capita...
http://www.bing.com/search?q=80054*(3%2B(4*4.56…

and a few other items and we totally loved they way the most relevant thing comes frist and is (usually) most prominent on the results page. Now granted, google generates similar results for some search terms, but we were blown away when we tried some travel related questions.

I have now told all my browsers to search Bing, (this includes Chrome – queue that chuckle again) and downloaded the Bing Api which I am yet to play with.

While chatting with him today I sent a phrase in spanish which he translated using http://www.microsofttranslator.com and we compared with results (once) on google. The first link we got on google could translate one word at a time, but Bing does *500*!!!. What's more, he scrolled down the page and we saw that there is a bot that can translate for you in Live messenger, … (at this point we were speechless)

I am no authority on the matter, but I think this is what searching (and translating, and the whole internet experience) should be.

Kudos to Microsoft, this is a brilliant product with multiple uses, is very convenient, and looks more elegant than some other engine I know.

We have some google heads here, but we are now *Binging the house down*. You should have started Start.com like this, and I probably would never had crossed the web to go to google.

I've been unhappy or frustrated too often with Google results. The ads at the top are really bad but perhaps the worst are the non-relevant results. I found when you do a search for an item, many times you will see a competitors product listed first and that's because the competitor paid more to appear first. That is absolutely ridiculous to me. Needless to say, I've been happy using Bing. It's been a pleasant experience as well as yielding surprisingly fast results. Finally, I'm very annoyed at the lack of elegance from Google. Enough with the primary colors already, we don't live in a 4 bit world. On that note, Bing wins in my book for being more stylish.

Another problem for me is that Safari for Mac's omnibar doesn't allow you to choose other search engines like FF, etc. So Mac users are locked in to Google. That really stinks. I prefer to have a choice.