Bing is not horrible

I've been playing with Bing for the past two months or so; I made it the default search in Firefox for research purposes.

After 60 days in the saddle I will say that Bing is ok for my casual searching, which is about 80% of my search time. I do find myself loading Google several times a week to get better results. Here are the places Bing appears to fall short in that 20% of the time where I switch to google

• Google filetype: and site: search keywords are genius and irreplaceable.
• Bing seems more focused on shopping-related results rather than pure research
• Bing's interface is pretty rather than clean; I prefer clean.
  

I'm going back to Google full time as it meets all my needs. I wanted to make sure I gave Bing a fair shake.

Fuh-reaking bing

Well, it looks like Yahoo has sold its innards to mickey$oft. Henceforth yahoo search results will be provided by Bing, Microsoft's next attempt to battle google.

I don't really blame Yahoo; they've been in a bad position for a really long time. Before search engines were the demonstratable Right Thing, there were two kinds of "portal" sites:

* search engines: altavista (!), hotbot (!), etc. Remember those? Do you remember when Altavista's boolean searches represented the absolute pinnacle? Nowadays it's mainly remembered as a bit of wordplay by the crack site astalavista. Not going to hotlink that one because it's usually NSFW.

* directories: mainly Yahoo. You submitted your site in a category and real humans verified the placement and published it. This model just doesn't scale in the normal sense. (You could probably scale it by crowdsourcing (having the public verify the info, like Wikipedia or something)). So yahoo left the directory behind and started a half-@ssed attempt to do spidering/search. Never really captured any mental territory.

I've used Bing a few times to see what it's like. It's not completely overhyped and useless.