mcld.co.uk

I have switched my browser's search engine from Google to Bing. I never thought it would come to this!

Years ago I migrated away from Microsoft, disliking what they were doing with their dominance. It feels odd to be deliberately turning to Microsoft now, for a very similar reason.

Google has unified what it does with your personal data, meaning that your emails, video views, web searches etc can all be smulged together for analytic/advertising purposes. I always resented Google's move into the "social" web - the best things that they make are NONsocial, tools that I use as tools - the web search being the main example. Google Scholar was a very important tool in my PhD thesis. Gmail is the best email interface I've used.

I don't want these tools mixed up with the social sharey web, and it made me uncomfortable when google "+1" buttons appeared in all the search results. This change in what they do with my personal data makes it even worse. My distaste is not really worries about what they'll do - but it's a growing problem to rely on just one company for many essential tools, definitely unhealthy, and I just want some of my web activity to be completely asocial and not built into the personal profile Google is building of me.

If you've not used Bing search before (I hadn't really), you might find it a bit funny how many of the Google search options are closely mirrored in the Bing interface - kinda comedy, but hopefully it'll make the transition easier. So far, the two things I really miss in Bing search are recent search results (e.g. in the past week) and scholar search. There's this thing called Microsoft Academic Search but it doesn't have as much content (I searched for "beatboxing" and most of my own research ain't in there - bah!).

But if I want to reduce my dependence on Google, I can't get rid of Youtube - that's where all the videos are - nor Gmail - that would be a massive wrench, changing email address. And I can't stop people giving me Google Maps links. So, even though search is what made Google what it is, weirdly it's the one thing of theirs I can cut out.

The nice thing about my having deliberately dropped Microsoft is that I don't depend on them for any service or system, and they don't have any data about me. So their Bing search can be exactly what I want it to be - a neutral, unpersonalised web search tool.