Bing Me
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.
Good word, James. With the advent of Bing, I did the same with Firefox (set default search to Bing). A former coworker of mine would do this regularly – each month rotate to using the next of the few major search (errr…. or \decision\?) engines. He was focused more on the design/layout of the result pages than search accuracy, but I definitely appreciated his take on keeping up with one’s alternatives. Unfortunately, I have yet to see any reason to use WolframAlpha, but I’ll try it again every now & again, as per your sage advice :-)
Posted on 10-Jun-09 at 5:38 pm | Permalink
@Tim:
For me, wolfram alpha is a really specific thing. I really like it, but it’s not a search engine, it’s a “knowledge engine”. If I want to know some fact like “population Houston”, I might turn to wolfram. It’s gonna get me the (an?) answer the quickest. And for mathy things it’s awesome.
I like the search on wolfram “2 apples + 1 onion”. That really show it’s got some cajones.
Posted on 10-Jun-09 at 5:43 pm | Permalink