The Bing it On Report

I’ve been participating in a challenge with several other bloggers, in partnership with Alt Summit. It has been a week of searching with Bing instead of Google, and today it’s time for the report. Did you try it out too? I use my browser’s built-in search bar and I installed Bing’s plugin for this challenge, so switching for the week was easy.

So, what was different? Well, I didn’t notice much of a difference a lot of the time. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I was frustrated, and most of the time I felt pretty neutral about the whole thing. There were lots of little differences that you only notice because of the novelty of having them or the strange feeling of missing something. For instance, I like autofill. Bing does it to a lesser extent, but only on its homepage. You know what I mean; like when you start typing “why” and it gives you a drop-down of queries and suddenly you want to know, yes, “why are manhole covers round?” I missed the serendipity. My productivity improved without the internet rabbit hole though, so there’s that.

I did like the social media integration a lot. I also liked Bing for travel because of its Price Predictor (buy those tickets now, or wait for a drop in price?). Shopping searches were a toss-up, but image search goes to Google. I find Google’s reverse image search is pretty indispensable as a blogger.

Switching was an interesting experiment. I think I’ll probably switch between Bing and Google moving forward, depending on what I need. I figure it’s good to shake up old habits from time to time, right?

 
This post is brought to you by Alt Summit and their partner Bing. I’m taking the Bing It On challenge this week.