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A week of using Bing

by Eoin | 26.06.2015
What happens when you decide to set yourself the challenge of using Bing for a week instead of Google?Bing Logo

It was an unmitigated failure to be honest. Not without want of trying, Google is so ingrained into the way that I interface with the web and information in general, that I would find myself defaulting automatically before I remembered my pledge.

I use an Android phone and am therefore almost wired into Google with my every move, which made it particularly hard not to somehow find myself on a Google service or search result.

On my desktop I had set my default homepage to Bing.com and was doing a bit better but still found myself jumping back on Google to find certain things. Obviously Google is still the key search traffic driver for all my clients and so it is hard not to need to use it during my working week.

Having said this I was pleasantly surprised with some functionality that Bing has evolved within their search, in particular their approach to Video and Image search. I found the interface very intuitive and helpful.

bing-video-results

Clearly in the example above all the results were YouTube videos and so quickly led me back into the Google garden.

Bing have also recently been talking about how they have upgraded their image processing within their algorithm and are able to recognise a more recent photograph of people, and reward that as being more relevant within the image results. This was famously promoted with the briefly popular (unpopular depending on your result) http://how-old.net

Despite the argument that more competition is a good thing for the user, if anything this brief test has proven to me how dependent/unconscious my use of Google has become.

Pick an alternative search engine and have a go and see how long you last.