Time for Bing to Shine as Viable Search Engine.

I have not used Microsoft’s Bing search engine in quite a while.  Despite great promise at launch in 2009 it still lingers at sub 10% usage versus the omni present Google.  I find the results take a good bit more work and less customised for Irish searches especially from my laptop.

However most of the time I use my iPhone for a large portion of searches and this is where Bing and alternative search engines have sudden become really important.  The iOS 9.3 update caused all sorts of problems particularly with trying to open links in searches.  Searches on the iPhone delivers the results but would not open the website when you click on the results.  A real problem when you are out and about and fully reliant on always on immediate answers to problems.

My own work around was to use Bing which although not perfect was good enough to find what I was looking for and it struck me as a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to remind the world that our over reliance on Google is not a particularly good thing.  Bing has now mentally moved for me and will probably impact on my future search activity.  I have downloaded the latest iPhone update which promises to fix the issue but the opening for a competitor has crept in.

Its an interesting conundrum for Google who is not to blame but opportunities like these do not present themselves very often for competitors and surprised I am not seeing more advantage been taken of it.  We are creatures of habits and engrained behaviour is very hard to change.  It also shows a chink in Google armour – however small and temporary.

Personally I will be using alternatives more from a position where I was happy to just get one view.

For anyone interested Wikipedia has a nice collection of the other many search alternatives.