httpwebwitch - 7:44 pm on Dec 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

OK it's been a week now.
Here are my thoughts.

1) I did consider going "all the way" this month by weaning myself cold turkey from all Google products. AdSense, AdWords, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, etc. I did not. But wherever possible, I have been using alternative Bing products when they exist.

2) I haven't missed Google yet. Bing has been giving me the results I need. Admittedly I have not been doing much heavy research this month, and my searches have been mostly banal: shopping, or programming-related RTFM searches

3) Bing Maps is good too. Way better than MapPoint was a few years ago. I still like Google Maps a lot. As mentioned earlier, I am deeply disappointed in Bing's international business listings.

4) Bing's SERPs do tend to include obscure, bizarre findings. I just Binged myself and found a 404 page, indexed (maybe because it doesn't actually send a 404 header), for a page about me that has been offline for at least 10 years. Bing is finding things that Goog ignores. Perhaps because their algo isn't as mature, Bing is letting things be seen that Goog deems inconsequential. That isn't necessarily a bad thing; Bing is ranking things well enough so the weird stuff isn't top 10 of the SERPs.

5) It is refreshing to see different results for common searches. I have discovered sources that I didn't know about previously because Goog's results often felt homogenous.

6) I do really wish Bing didn't link to their cached page. This was a bad idea when Google did it, and Bing is just playing copycat. There may be a compelling case for exposing your cache to the user, but there are more compelling reasons not to IMHO.

7) Bing has a very good index of WebmasterWorld, with fresh posts appearing very quickly in their results. Makes me wonder how aggressively they are pounding the board with their bots. Are they making use of the site's RSS syndication to assist their crawling?