You can always Bing me.

Well most of you "I love only Google" guys out there and those who use Bing only because they are worried about Google's evil world domination plans, to them i say "Bing em on". Bing is great for a lot of things and its really fast as well. Its been my default search engine on my default browser (Google Chrome) for a while, so you cant say I'm a Microsoft loyalist or anything. Truth is what do users want, simple answers to their queries and Bing does as brilliant as a job as Google does (even better with Videos) except maybe when it comes to News, where Google does a better job.

Like i said before : "Bings marketing strategy is on the mark calling it a decision engine than a search engine, coz then they would have to explain, Bing formerly Live Search which was formerly Windows Live Search and before that MSN Search powered by Inktomi which earlier was powered by AltaVista. "Bing & Decide" - is a great catch line for bing and the team that came up with the Ad, surely deserves applause."

See the Bing Ads.

At times I do have to shift to Google on some rare occasions coz I am looking for a link I know I visited before and its maybe there in Google's list of search results  or when I want to double check why Bing did'nt get me exactly what i wanted (well Google didnt either)- so its fairly a great alternative to Google and I havnt lost much being on bing for the last few months. Thought i love Bing's image view and the presentation - great features, i just cant get away from the easy image listing on Google and keep going back to it for images - coz i like to randomly check out a couple of images by opening them in new windows which Bing Image view sort of does'nt allow me to open a new window from the image listing page. (Note to Bing Developers -please fix this)

Then there is WolframAlpha the Answer engine according to Wikipedia or  in their own words, its a Computational Knowledge Engine (everything is an engine now a days- well whatever works - coz I'm designing a UI strategy for a Metrics Engine at work) anyways love it too for its simple brilliance in giving you answers you would have to search at 10 different places and put it together. I know a lot of people hate it (same people who said Gmail, facebook, twitter sucked) and its being reported that 1/2 the search on WolframAlpha does'nt bring up results because it cant interpret the linguistic of the query, which WolframAlpha team is reportedly fixing in a hurry.

But the thing thats been at the back of my mind about these two new Decision & Answer engine was, why don't they just collaborate to give the Search Engine (Google) a run for their money. Well some one is reading my mind and its official now, Bing has struck a licensing deal with WolframAlpha. Also given that Microsoft has seen potential in WolframAlpha's technology and the value it can add to their Bing strategy, gives me satisfaction that my excitement with WolframAlpha was well placed. Also the fact that Bing will power search across Yahoo properties is also a big deal. But to ever imagine that Bing from Microsoft would ever stand face to face with Google (preference and im used to Google apart) is really a stunning tale in itself and may some day tell tales of how Bing turned it all around. And i want to be right there saying, hey - I told you so.