[danilocampos]

Hat's off to Microsoft on this one - they've earned it.

I don't use Bing for my day to day search but I've used their travel search and it's not too bad. It's definitely no Hipmunk, but it's clean, minimal and pretty snappy.

They've made some effort to take a dull product, make it useful, improve its design and differentiate it from the competition. Yeah, the logo is hideous and embarrassing. Yeah, they've also spent a lot of cash on the advertising.

In the end, though, they've expended more effort in making their search product worth using than Yahoo has recently. So bravo.

Meanwhile: Boy, has Yahoo just lost its fighting spirit or what? What are they doing over there? There's never any interesting news from their corner. Stuck in the mud. They don't even own their search results or PPC product anymore. It's a shame, they've got a good and trusted brand.

[brandonkm]

Yahoo, within the last five years especially, seemed to fall victim to the economics of the search engine space. That is, they failed to properly differentiate their product in any meaningful way and never once had a very strong focus on the experience of search. Web search just became too important and they were relegated to continually play catch-up while Microsoft crafted their strategy which, from this bit of news, seemed to have been fairly effective.

[NumberFiveAlive]

For sure. For a while there, I tried it as my default. I came back to Google for the long tails on my obscure coding error searches, but until the recent Google revamp, I would go back to Bing specifically for image searches.

Also, I still use Bing for certain, ahem, less savory searches. They have Google beat for that. I think they optimize for it, whereas Google has stated that they don't key on it either way.

Either way, shaking up the search landscape is a good thing for all of us even if you never touch Bing. Google has definitely been forced back to innovate their search UX since Bing has come out (Image search, Instant, reformatting the results screen, etc.). We all win in that scenario.

[code_duck]

You're right, they've definitely earned a distant number 2. Hooray!