Over the last week, I’ve been batting for the other team; after several days of frustration and annoyance, it started to become quite normal, routine and dare I say it, better! I should probably say right now that, no I haven’t come out despite the blog image – so guess again…
Yep, I switched from Google to Bing as my search engine of choice. Now, whilst I’d like to say I’m a political animal and I think it’s inherently wrong that Google, Amazon and Starbucks aren’t paying their UK Corporation tax and my companies and clients all do and actually I took a stand, and switched to Bing and Costa Coffee out of protest. What actually happened was I reformatted and reinstalled my PC after the Windows 8 debacle and decided I was too lazy to select a new search provider.
To be honest, I was getting rather annoyed with Google – it now gives me information up front about celebs without me having to go to Wikipedia. I want to go to Wikipedia. The search engine results are so skewed and screwed by intensive SEO activities going on, that every man and his blog is getting paid to put links in their articles to help out the big corporations. I’m not interested in big corporations. After all, they don’t pay their taxes. The corporations are even paying Google for top of the page ads which also helps their natural search results.
I’m looking for the small niche products, the entrepreneurs and actually stuff that’s not samey.
Consequently, I haven’t found much of interest on the internet for some time and needed some time away from Google. I have to admit, having used Windows Phone 7.5, I have been relatively impressed with Bing.com and maybe it’s starting to come of age, I don’t really rate their Maps at the moment and I’m fairly annoyed that “Unleashed IT” searched on Bing our site comes nowhere, whilst “Unleashed IT Ltd” does; however that all said after a week of using it intensively, I have found everything I wanted to on the first page. I am therefore wondering at which point I will make the switch back to Google.
Bing is becoming more and more integrated into various Microsoft products and whilst, thanks to EU competition law, you have a choice, sometimes laziness makes you try something and it just becomes part of the normal routine.
Google seem to have made some strange decisions, they’ve plugged more and more sales of their advertising tools to increase peoples search rankings, they’ve spurned a whole industry of SEO, which I am told can either be black-hat or white-hat, whatever that means. To me they pulled the MSI (corporate) installer of the Google toolbar which makes me wonder where their priorities are. The student ideals that Google started with seem to be as long gone as Microsoft’s and lives you ultimately wondering which is the lesser of two evils – they ultimately now seem to be two sides of the same coin.
