Dismantle Me

After 1 week of using Bing, I have gotten a good feel for the new search engine.  Here is my wrap up from Bing Week.

Things I Liked

I really like the look and feel.  It’s a much smoother experience compared to Google.  It’s easily just as fast as Google and the main search page loads quickly as well.

I liked the search history right inline with the page.  Being a developer and tech guy, I search mostly for programming issues, stack traces and error messages.  I frequently try several searches before I find what I am looking for.  It’s helpful to be able to backtrack through previous searches without having to look through history of searches (which is a pain for me in Google because they all look the same in the history bar) and without having to use the back button which never seems to behave like I think it should when moving between multiple searches and results.

A friend of mine pointed out that this is all well and good until your wife sees your search history – then it could be a problem.  I’m not holding my or others search morals against Bing.

I am a big fan of the preview that pops up when you mouse of the hover indicator.  It isn’t helpful all the time, but it does save you some unnecessary visits.

Things I did NOT like

There was only one thing that really bugged me.

For some reason or other (be it browser or Bing), whenever I would click out of the search box and back in, it wouldn’t let me backspace right away.  That was very annoying.

Final Thoughts

I really think that Bing is a great contender when considering it has to go up against Google.  I still feel like Google “knows” what I want while Bing is merely making a very educated guess.

Even though this is the case, the improved UI experience is enough to make me stick with Bing for the time being.  It wasn’t a clear winner, but it that’s the final split decision.