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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Of course it is a legitimate threat - if Bing started doing searches in any consistently better way than Google I'd use that. I have about as much loyalty to Google as a service as I did to Altavista: i.e. practically none.

I suspect others think this way and Google knows it.

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Google's index is increasingly polluted. Let me give you an example, the other day I needed the exact address of an electronics store, I entered the name of the company and the street it was on. The top search results were "places to eat near..." - WTF? Who searches for places to eat near a named shop!? Similarly, if you search for "X review" you will mostly get pages that are just affiliate links to retailers and the text "Be the first to write a review of X!"

Right now Bing is a better search engine even if the only reason is that fewer people are trying to game it. The thing that makes Google most useful is searching other people's sites (e.g. adding +site:news.bbc.co.uk to your search terms). As a standalone service, they're going the way Altavista went.

We're both speaking in anecdotes, but this hasn't been my experience. I had my search box in Firefox set to Bing for several weeks, until it was just too annoying to re-do so many searches in Google and getting better results. For what it's worth, most of those searches tended to be technical questions, not local searches like you describe, but in my experience those are adequete on Google as well, and if something comes up incorrect my first backup is usually Yelp and not Bing.

I have quite a bit of loyalty to Google. I use them for RSS, Email, Calendar, Documents, mobile alerts, maps and phone service among other things.

I have no doubt that Google will improve and adjust to any threats Bing might one day bring. The cost of me moving all of my data and changing habits to another place would be high. That and there is no way in hell I'd trust Microsoft with my data.

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