I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today, just as an experiment. I can't tell if what frustration I am experiencing is just due to not being used to it, but I will say that any other time I've tried doing this (Yahoo, Live, Ask), I've quickly switched back to Google simply because I couldn't get my work done. The fact that it's been more than an hour and I haven't given up on it says a lot.
I've been using Bing as my default search in FF all day today
I must admit I've just started to do the same and am getting the same result. I quickly added bing and its not sucking...
.. as someone who wrote off Microsoft only a few months ago and still on my "Fuck yeah, open source! Fuck Microsoft!" high, I'm feeling a little conflicted.
Not to deliberately derail the thread or anything, but if you in any way associate using google search with promoting open-source, you are doing something wrong. Google search is (too) as proprietary as it gets.
As for bing, I gave it a shot. After switching to the US version it was a whole new product. My biggest complaint so far is the lack of intelligent porn-searches :P
The search is proprietary, but the company itself is one of (if not the) largest supporters of open source software out there. http://code.google.com/opensource/
Using Google for search makes Google money. Google reinvests a not-too-shabby amount of that money back into open source software. Ergo, using Google search promotes open source.
Google also releases stuff by subsidizing them like crazy. Guess what happens to people who make better products? No one hears about them because all the techies are circle jerking themselves over the new Google product.
I'm pretty sure you're just talking out of your ass. Google has a long and storied history of releasing things to the sound of chirping crickets (Orkut, Froogle, Knol, Custom Search, etc.), and a lot of their services that aren't necessarily duds certainly aren't being circle-jerked over, either (Checkout, News, Finance, etc.)
Well, you totally missed the point. Perhaps I should have made myself clearer
I recently switched from Windows to Linux after having become disillusioned with Microsoft's ability to ship a product that worked reasonably.
Therefore, the "yay open source, boo microsoft" sentiment was based off that.
Now, having tried the Windows 7 beta and now bing... I might have to rethink that position on MS's ability in software development.
(I just know someone will say "but they've just bought all that new search technology, Google is still better" or something similar... so to cut you off at the pass, Google also has acquisitions regarding search, so your argument will be invalid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions)
That's the case with most big companies. They have one hit - the initial product that made them big in the first place - and a bunch of acquisitions. In some cases (Microsoft), their big hit was even an acquisition.
It's because most new products fail. Whether they're developed by a startup or a big company. But big companies have the luxury of a lot of cash that they can use to buy the products that are already successful. If you compare internal efforts that have to pass through Sturgeon's Law vs. acquired startups that have already passed the "successful" filter, of course the ones that are already successful will be more successful. It's a tautology. ;-)
Google is actually doing better than most big companies, with at least three internally-developed products that are big hits (Search, GMail, and Orkut).
Maybe, but Google took some of their profits and invested in open source projects like Wave. Microsoft took the money they made and spent it on Vista and 7.
What do you mean? The protocol documentation is already up, the api docs are already up, and they've promised to release their reference implementation. Are you just trolling?
