Youngsters to the web might not remember a time before Google, where search engines basically sucked. They were based on simple and stupid algorithms which were easily gamed, and only occasionally got you to a site you wanted to visit. Google was so successful because their search engine worked vastly better than the competitions. Back then, if you were looking on information on a particular subject, you would go through a list of search engines, until you got a useful hit. There were even meta search engines which agglomerated the results of several search engines. These all died out quickly after google went up.

Since Google, pretty much everyone I know just uses Google. If a particular search is unsuccessful, we try experimenting with different terms. I don’t think I ever go to another search engine.

But I try to be open minded. So when I heard that Bing didn’t suck, I gave it a shot. I picked 5 searches I might be interested in and search in Bing and Google. I consider it effectively a tie. Sometimes Bing’s results were better, sometimes Google’s, but in neither of them did I get a bullshit result that was clearly inferior to another’s.

So chapeau Microsoft. You appear to have gotten your head out of your ass and produced a respectable product. If you’re as successful with Natal as you were with Bing, you might even get me to buy one of your products!