Fortunately, I just found out about BlindSearch. It conducts your searches in Yahoo, Google, and Bing and presents the results in a randomized 3-column layout with all the engine's brand cruft scratched out. On the first search I did, for philosophistry, I voted for the Bing version! (via waxy)

I decided to renew my 1-week experiment with Bing by making BlindSearch my default search engine. To make this happen in Firefox, I'm using this add-on: Add to Search Bar.

Today and last night I did a lot of technical searching, specifically for Movable Type-related help. I'd instinctively hit the Firefox keyboard command Ctrl+K to get to the search box, type my string, then hit enter, and forget for a moment that the search was set to Bing.

About two-thirds of the time, I couldn't find what I was looking for. I started to get worried. I started to not trust Bing. And so I'd sneak in the same searches on Google. To my surprise, I couldn't find what I was looking for there either. So, that's one positive point for Bing. If I can't find it on Bing and Google, then, given the expectations for Bing, that's a point in its favor.

However, the search results between the two were vastly different. This made me suspicious. Because I've trusted Google so much, it made me wonder if Bing was incomplete. It would be very hard for Bing to create the impression that it was the other way around.

I expect that I'll eventually switch back to Google and use it for every search. There was a time, maybe 2000 and earlier, when the smart searcher would visit a variety of search engine's (AltaVista, Yahoo, and Google) to get the best results. Now, there's just so much trust that if it ain't on Google, it's assumed you won't find it elsewhere.

It seems the narrative Bing is running with is that it's close-enough to Google. By doing so, users will be less likely to switch from their default IE home pages. And then Microsoft will play the same game it's always played, by working its OS-monopoly.

Having said that, I did try out Bing, and I agree, it's not bad! Actually, it addresses a feature that really bugged me about Google.

Don't you hate typing in a bunch of keywords into Google, then when you click on search results, you can't find the keywords on that page? Even if you use the "+" trick in the search expression, you'll still get pages with none of that content. Then you have to hit "Back" and go to the cached version, only to find that the keywords aren't there. All in all, you wasted about 30 seconds.

Bing has a new feature that gives you expanded contexts when you mouse over search results:

This is really cool! So in the spirit of trying new things, I'm going to make Bing my default search engine on Firefox for at least this week.

Bing passes the essential pre-requisites to be the alternative Google:

Does it have comprehensive search results? From my cursory attempts, it does. Check.

Is it snappy? Yup. Check.

Okay.

I agree with the title of this reddit thread.

A good comment from chakalakasp:

The funny thing is that many studies (funded by the newspapers) show that most readers won't read past the "jump" (the spot on a page that says "story continues on page A4") in a real life hold-in-your-hands newspaper

I also like gruber's comment, from two months ago:

I must have some weird strain of dyslexia. Whenever I see a link named "Next Page", I think it says "Stop Reading and Close This Tab".