My Bing Experiment: May the Best Search Engine Win.

I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now that Facebook and Bing (Microsoft) have reached an agreement to partner for search. Facebook will provide Bing with Social Graph data through their instant personalization feature, still opt-out. This will allow Bing to show you relevant information fed from your Facebook network’s “Likes.”

The idea is that by making search more social–read that as more social because of Facebook–that search results will be more relevant. One thing I find interesting about that is that Google has been serving up information from my Twitter network in search results for quite some time now…but I guess that doesn’t count as “social” to most reporters and bloggers.

My biggest issue with this deal is obviously that the partnership that Facebook chose is with Microsoft and not Google.

I can’t stand Microsoft…there I said it.

Microsoft could mess up a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich…they seriously could. They’d offer it in 5 different versions, the packaging would be beautiful on all of them but when you unwrapped it you’d find that there is something wrong with each of them; not the least of which is that you’d need a “Wizard” to begin eating it and midway through your breakfast, the sandwich would explode.

With the exception of the Xbox and Windows 7, I don’t think Microsoft has delivered one product I could be excited about.

My experience with Microsoft has led me to believe that every product they release has a convoluted user interface with far too many options to be useful and easy to use.  Here’s Word with ALL toolbars open.

My experience with Microsoft is that people don’t use its products because they are best in class, but simply because that is what they are used to, it’s lazy. My perception of Microsoft is that it hasn’t got the first idea how to innovate and that its best game plan is to imitate. I can’t stand Steve Ballmer, I think he is a vision-less bonehead.

I believe all of these things to such a degree that if they do release something new, something exciting, I can’t even see past the experiences I’ve had.

I really like Google…but you probably already knew that.

I cut Google a lot of slack. They’ve had privacy issues, similar to Facebook….but I cut them a lot more slack than Facebook. I use Google products, lots of them. My experience with Google has been overwhelmingly positive. I like the search results I get. I “get” the way to run a search and find exactly what I need. I like Google Docs, Google Reader and Gmail. I think Google Wave was interesting and ambitious but missed the mark. When Google launched Buzz, I wanted it to succeed.

My Experiences have made me closed minded

We all want to believe that we are open minded people. I know I do. The problem is, if I let my past experiences dictate my future actions all of the time, I would not be open minded.

My motto about food is “I’ll try anything three times and if I don’t like it…I’ll try it again.”. It’s served me well. I used to hate tomatoes, now i love them. I used to despise peas, now I love them. Olives, asparagus…the list goes on and on.

So even though I’ve had my heart broken by Microsoft in the past; even though I suffer through the nonsense of providing tech support to helpless PC users, fighting through errors with no obvious solution when I could solve a problem on a Mac in seconds; and even though my past experience tells me that everything Microsoft designs they make more complicated, with more options than needed, I have to try it again.

I’m switching to Bing for the next month (until 11/15)

Several, months ago, I switched for a week…after 5 days I retroactively declared it was a work week. I “tried” to give Bing a chance before but in reality my love for Google and concurrent hatred of all things Redmond undermined any real chance Bing had.

So I’m going to really try.

I’m going to fight the urge to switch back when I can’t find what I’m looking for and I’m going to fight thinking about Ballmer’s sweaty “Developers rant” when I search for something. I’m going to fight the urge to scream when I think of the HUGE marketing budget that this “underdog” has devoted to trying to rename a “search” engine into a “decision” engine…because that truly infuriates me.

I want to see what the Facebook integration has to offer. I want Google to have competition because quite honestly Google has really stepped up its game since Bing came along.

I’m going to do all of this, and do my best to remain open minded. But just to be clear here is what I’m fighting against, these are all of my prejudices against Microsoft so if I come out of this month with Bing defeating Google, you know they really did their job.