Bing: Final Answer

So I gave Microsoft's newly repackaged search engine a one-month test drive just to see how I felt about it. No, I didn't really use it exclusively, but I did use it a lot. I used it for general searches when I had a question, and I used it for image searches, which I do a lot especially for this blog.

Here's what I think about Bing. It's lightning fast, maybe a hair faster than Google but I didn't bother trying to figure out how to time it. Let's just say speed definitely wasn't an issue. The results are also well-organized, and I found what I wanted usually within the top three hits. I like the organization of the images better than Google's arrangement, although it took a little getting used to. I also love the daily photo changes on the front page of the Bing.com site. Very pretty.

Though I definitely don't have a problem with using Bing on a regular basis, the practical thing for me is to stick with Google. Google is embedded into my default browser (Safari) as well as my backup browser (Firefox). That fact alone makes it highly unlikely that I'll switch to Bing any time soon. If my favorite browser in the future has Bing as the default search engine, I won't bother to change it. But I'm also not going to bother with figuring out how to change the current default search engine either. So I'm sticking with Google.

But Bing really is a comparable product to Google. I'm very impressed with it, and don't mind using it at all. It'll stay on my bookmark bar so I can click it every once in a while just to change things up. I think Microsoft did a bang-up job with it.