The Bing search page has a nice soothing picture which is necessary if only to separate it from the rather sparse offerings from Google and Yahoo. Of course, sparse is good when mobile computing and presumably an option is present or will be added to reduce the loading on a mobile computing device. There are limits as to how different a search engine page can look, and Microsoft tend to get much flak if anything of theirs looks even remotely similar to others. However, a search engine page should not be judged by how it looks. Search results are what count most.

My start page is a highly personalized Pageflakes, where I have many quick links to the variety of stuff that go to daily, so I don’t actually get to see the pretty picture or the list of generalized links along the top. Instead, I have added it to IE8 search providers as the default search engine. If it is anything like as good as the Microsoft search engine which was part of Internet Explorer when first released, I will probably keep it that way.

To be perfectly honest, I  really don’t care which search engine I use as long as it gets me the results that I want. I don’t care that 37,000,000 sites have been found in 0.14 seconds because looking through them all would take way longer than I have left to live. In any case, most of the searches are duplicates, especially those dealing with computer related problems which appear word for word on every forum known to man.

Ideally, a list of maybe ten reputable web sites will do me and, so far, Bing is doing that. If I find that Bing is not giving me what I want, I will try Google and then Yahoo and if I have to keep looking elsewhere, Bing will be demoted. It is as simple as that.