In all seriousness, I like Bing. I like their maps better, and their home page is nicer.

Agreed. I figured it would be another lame iteration of MSN Search, but it's pretty friggin' great. M$ isn't doing too bad hiring all these Yahoo guys...

When I first saw bing I thought my browser was hacked and I was redirected to some shady advertisers part of the internet.

The 'hacked' part was not true it turned out, as for the shady advertisers corner..well..

Oh wow.

IE8 goes "critical update" and installs itself on over a hundred million PC's and whaddayaknow, a month later it has an increased market share over last month

Hell, it's almost like IE replaces your existing search engine with Bing or something.

Hang on, Captain Obvious is phoning me, brb.

#39

amen.

although to be fair, sometimes popularity can be helpful. the problem we have now is, if something is not popular it just won't be found. which isn't really good enough

bing, yahoo, google, whatever. All the search engines offer different flavors of cream toppings for what is basically the same underneath- hit counters for sites- end up providing the user with a popularity vote rather than a context search.
I've been using google since it was used when yahoo adopted their early algorithm in 2000 (?). How nice the results were. Use of a slightly extended context search string often led us to lesser 'hit' but more context relevant sites.
But over the last few years, since google started the linking of search results to the google-analytics applet, many lesser known, but very helpful, and relevant sites just disappeared.
Many times, I couldn't locate the websites even after entering the institutions' names in the search, but when I directly entered the site address in the browser, the site opened.
We don't need popularity votes, but context relevant searches.
Oh! And how did I get hold of the site addresses i couldn't loacte in teh first place? I 'boxed' them! It means asked my friends by word of mouth! Maybe that would give google and ms something to think about; or maybe they'll bask in the statistical glory of success.
My analysis of the 3 is as follows-
Google- popularity vote
Yahoo- more relevant but algorithm far from satisfactory, many irrelevant and outdated results. But love their experimental context sorting. Its helpful at least.
Bing- used only the video preview and pic search after reading about the thubnail preview feature. Hogs bandwidth as it caches the images and videos in the search result window. Lowest preference in searches also.

Idea: bingle.com, to mix results from google & bing together.

I've been using Bing myself since launch... and its really very good. Its taken over as my normal default search engine.

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

This site lets search Google, Yahoo, and Bing side by side, without knowing which is which until you vote for the one that gives the best results. Just playing around with it, Google seems to better more than half the time for my text searches, and so far has always been better for image searches.

What's the guess of the year's domain name? Microsoft is on a bi-annual "re-vision" of their search to drive users there.

MSN.com has failed.
Live.com has failed.
(what else am I missing?)

Bing.com hasn't failed, but time will tell.

I'll also point out one thing: every programmer friend I have uses Google.com to search Microsoft's Technet for answers.

I just can't get past the "White Christmas" song when people talk about Bing...

Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing.

I wouldn't call this nipping at Google's heels.

Maybe nipping at Yahoo's heels.

i still dislike the way bing shows results... seems like msn search, wasting space on the screen, the results are ok, but i felt it unconmfortable

That's some incredible spin. A small one-month increase, one month after a re-launch accompanied by advertising and promotions, is not a lot of data from which to divine an "underlying trend."

Its just from their advertising blitz, and the free money Microsoft is giving away with the bing shopping thing.