The last few weeks I've switched the default home pages on my various machines to Bing instead of Google. Am trying to get out of the habit of typing Google then pressing Ctrl-Enter (to wrap www. and .com around it) and instead type Bing. It's been quite a few years of typing Google so the habit is hard to break.

Anyway, I've been using Bing now for a few weeks solid. Most of the time I'm using the search engine to eek out stuff I know is "out there", and when Bing doesn't bring it back I double check with Google.

All in all i'm getting more and more confident with the results from Bing, and I like the interface. I'd say my success rate using it is around the 75\85% mark (for what I search for, mostly technical geeky stuff) and I'm not having to fall back to using Google that often.

I have to say, although Bing is surfacing the data I need, I am still switching to Google now and then. I'm no search engine guru, and I, like most of us just see a front end, type stuff in and get\want results. I don't care how it works behind the scenes, but I get the feeling Bing is closing down the gap that exists between the two search engines.

So, now I'm using two search engines, one for the main search (Bing), and the other (Google) as the fallback if the former doesn't bring back what I want, or doesn't bring anything back. I'm happy to continue doing this.

I like how I get taken to Wikipedia articles without leaving the BING UI, and I also like the daily changing wallpaper with interactive hotspots. I very much like this feature :-) I would suggest giving Bing a go, and comparing a few search results of your own. Don't get put off by Google returning twice as much data, often it's just junk\background noise anyway, that you wouldn't click through.

Read the complete post at http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/r0b/archive/2009/10/09/using-bing.aspx