So it’s been a 2 weeks since I switched Chrome’s default search engine from Google to Bing, and this is what I’ve got to say.
It’s not bad, but there’s nothing there that blows my socks off. The image search is way better than Google’s, but the regular search results are *slightly* less relevant sometimes than Google’s. I found myself at maybe once a day re-searching the same term on Google to find what I want. My searches typically have a very technical bent, so maybe that is relevant.
Oh and I don’t like the maps, but I think that may just be my fondness for Google Maps. The Bing maps aren’t bad either. I can’t quantify my distaste for the Bing Maps, but I don’t like them as much as Google’s. I think it may just be an aesthetic thing.
So the conclusion? I’m switching it back. It still feels foreign, and I think it’s a little less relevant to me than Google is for the things I search for.
Now I’m on the prowl for the next thing to jump into whole hog and test my preconceptions.
So this app I’m writing and maintaining at my day job. It accepts requests over this painful legacy protocol, performs some action based on that request, encodes the result in the same painful legacy protocol, and returns it to the client.
The way it’s designed, it has an array of IMessageHandlers that are each bound to a particular request type. So if a GETPRT request comes in, it loads up the GetPartMessageHandler which processes it and returns a result to send back to the client.
I had an epiphany a while back. This is MVC. If I didn’t have to deal with the legacy network protocol and weird encoding scheme, I could drop all this custom message handling code stuff in the dumpster and drop in one of 800 MVC web app frameworks and be done with it.
The command type, say GETPRT, could be mapped to http://server/GETPRT, and we could use our handy dandy routing engine to say route $GETPRT^ to the GetPart action on the PartController.
So in essence, I think I grew an MVC framework. It’s actually a little Django-ish, because I don’t really use controllers. But neat.
I wonder if I could have saved time if I had realized this would fit so well with MVC from the get go.
We are naturally biased towards the things we are most familiar with. Learning something involves an investment in it, and often times there is an emotional investment as well. We become attached emotionally to the things we’re constantly exposed to.
This can be a good thing, but it can also lead to stagnation. We have to force ourselves to invest a little bit in alternatives so we can see what is new and what is out there, otherwise we just keep writing sprocs for our databases or writing assembly instead of using C “because it gets the job done”.
So in this vein, I set my default search engine in Chrome to bing.com last wednesday after listening in on the girldeveloper.com WAN. I’ll update soon with my experiences. I want to give myself enough time for my google-addicted self to unlearn and truly experience Bing to see if it’s worth its salt.
