[splatterdash]

Forgive me for being too blatant, but I'm puzzled by their reason of doing this. Do people really switch search engines because of the UI? I understand that some people might prefer the less cluttered version, but when it comes down to it, the way it looks is secondary to its primary function: giving you good results. After a while, the look becomes less important.

I don't think it also serves their interest well, too, when their UI is a reminder of their competitor (the retro look of their competitor, to be precise). Google succeeded with a minimalistic UI because it made them look different from the rest and no one did it before. When Bing does it now, it makes them look like Google.

[panacea]

>the way it looks is secondary to its primary function: giving you good results.

I'm honestly not trying to be mean, but I'm not sure you understand human psychology in this area. Humans are very consistently swayed by looks over intrinsic value.

People aren't necessarily doing quantitative A/B tests between search engines, they're just plugging the latest search terms they want answers to into the search field and (in many cases) getting a search result that seems to fit the bill.

If the search engine displays results in an visually uncluttered (seemingly authoritative) way then that would seem like a good search engine choice.

There was that blog post the other day where someone updated and improved their site design and was lauded by users for all the new features they had introduced, when all they'd done was refresh the design.

[splatterdash]

> I'm honestly not trying to be mean,

Hey, no problem :), I'm just here for the discussion.

> but I'm not sure you understand human psychology in this area. Humans are very consistently swayed by looks over intrinsic value.

I do understand that looks matter to a degree. Some website redesigns does make them much more appealing. But I feel like at best the effects are only temporary. It doesn't take long before the user gets bored and thinks about how ugly it looks, unless the redesign comes with added functionality/feature (which I fail to find in this case).

Moreover, I mentioned earlier that it doesn't seem beneficial for Bing that its redesign is a reminder of its competitor. So I still find their decision puzzling.

[panacea]

>unless the redesign comes with added functionality/feature (which I fail to find in this case).

The redesign, in-and-of-itself likely provides added f/f in terms of reduced cognitive load in parsing the search results page. It's simple and easily grokked.

>a reminder of its competitor.

I don't think anyone is definitively and quantifiably testing Google search results in their day to day lives, but I suspect there's a nagging sense that they're not really as 'good' as they used to be.

I speculate that it's because the results have become more cluttered. Very few people would consciously compare Bing 2.today with Google 2.yesterday.

I think it's a clever play. It will probably not pan out as it's difficult to turn a ship as large as "Default Search" in another direction but we live in interesting times.

[ufo]

Around 90% of the searches I do are for "easy" things that any search engine should be able to find. Since I would only need to go back to Google for around 10% of the searches, if a competing search engine made the 90% case more pleasant to use would be a win for me.

[MichaelGG]

Are you sure about that? Since one of out ten searches would fail, I'd think one would quickly develop a bias and start saying "Bing never works for my searches and I always have to go back to Google anyways."

[AznHisoka]

I would think so. You're using it almost everyday, and annoying things will make you switch.

[splatterdash]

That seems plausible only if the search quality differs by a small margin. I haven't been using Bing extensively, but I remember trying some queries a while ago and Google was showing better results. Is this still the case now or have they improved considerably?

[aneth]

I've tried to use Bing as my default search engine in moments of frustration but always go back to Google. The main reason is UI. Bing has too much fancy JavaScript that slows it down and confuses me ever so slightly, and the information is a little harder to scan, perhaps because of familiarity with Google.