Anyone who knows me will know that I am a Google Supporter, but will also know that I am a Microsoft partner and believe that Open and Proprietary software can coexist and should.

When Bing was released I was not super impressed and didn’t like the whole image background and well images in general on a search page.

I have now made a point of testing queries in Google and Bing and am surprised to see the difference in results, Microsoft has come a long way in their search technology and Bing is starting to impress me.

I have set Bing as my default search engine in IE, I guess that they are kind of made for each other so I have paired them up on my system.

I do feel that Bing should clean up it’s interface a bit and that some of it’s features which may be awesome on a really fast uncapped connection, but consume a bit more bandwidth than I am willing to part with on my connection at this stage and may pose a serious impact for corporate users as well as home users on slower connections.

I find that Bing is really good at helping me find info MS related troubleshooting and have spent a lot of time using it to find solutions to vista related issues.

Something else that I really like about Bing is the fact that my website and more of my social profiles come up in the first page of results when searching for my name.

Either Bing knows I am actually just hoping to see my site at the top of their list or they are using totally different ranking methods, which is more than likely the case. Google also has a bigger index and more history of other sites to compare my query against, so results in Google have probably been weighted against a far greater data pool making the order in which results appear more relevant to the web at large and the context in which the search query was submitted.

Will I be switching to IE and Bing on a permanent basis, to that I would have to say no. I’ll be sticking to FireFox and Google for now and keep all my other browser for testing and site evaluation.