As of writing this post, Google has a 91.46% market share in search engines. As such, I understand straight away that this post would be controversial; but hear (read) me out.

For the last 2 decades, I have regularly used bing as the search engine of choice. I don’t remember why I started using it, but it must have had something to do with my Microsoft ecosystem phase. Either ways, I did dabble with a few different search engines (Read: DuckDuckGo, Ecosia) for a while, but used Bing overwhelmingly.

Over these 2 decades, I got used to people ridiculing me for not using Google. Recently, I started to wonder what I was missing out on. So I decided to bite the bullet and see what I was missing out on. I decided to use Google exclusively for a few weeks.

I was overwhelmingly disappointed.

Google doesn’t respect Wikipedia

I am a big fan of Wikipedia and refer to its articles multiple times daily for reference. Google just doesn’t want to show me Wikipedia results, for whatever reason. Here’re the search results of a popular tourist place on Google vs Bing

Google takes up more than half of the page to show me news reports from Chiang Mai. Then it takes up space to show me useless questions about it. Only when I scroll to the second page to I see a Wikipedia article about it.

Bing, on the other hand shows me some ads, but the Wikipedia entry is right on the first page where I can see it. I love how Bing shows Wikipedia results at the top of most search results, exactly how I would want it.

Irrelevant Image Results

Let’s say I want to see photos of the scientist Werner Heisenberg. Here’re the image search results from Google and Bing

Its because of irrelevant results like this that people end up embarrassing themselves this way.

Integration with Office Intranet

Bing has this nifty tab called “Work”.

Clicking on it shows search results from the company’s own Intranet. I find this immensely helpful while using Bing at work.

Porn

I don’t think I need to share screenshots, but Bing is much better for this purpose, trust me.

Beautiful Images

Bing shows beautiful wallpapers on its homepage. Google has its doodles but I prefer Bing’s wallpapers. Although if you search directly from the address bar like me, you would miss it most of the times.

Overall, I don’t think I would be changing my default search engine any time soon.