Google vs. Bing - what's the difference?
It was astonishingly easy to quit Googling. In Chrome, Google's Web browser, I clicked a couple buttons in the Settings tab, and voilà, my default search engine was Bing. The great thing about Chrome is that it remembers your preferences across all your computers - I only needed to switch to Bing on my desktop, and there it was on my laptop, too. (Thank you, Google!)
I made the same change on my iPhone and my iPad. The whole thing took 15 seconds and came without any advanced planning or any weighing of the potential downsides. I switched to Bing on a lark - and I've stuck with it, for better or worse, for a week.
What attracted me at first was purely aesthetic. Last week, I saw a picture of Bing's redesigned results page, and I was smitten. The new Bing is like the old Google - your results are presented on a clean, uncluttered page consisting of a lot of links and a few unobtrusive ads. The design suggests prim efficiency and utility, qualities I've always associated with Google. But Google has changed. Over the last year, the world's best search engine has gotten tarted up with "social results."
