Definitely not a bad option, but as Mr. Arrington says, "I’m used to Google and I know how to find the things I’m looking for."
I honestly cannot think of a time in the past year where Google has failed to locate sufficiently relevant information for a given query. If Google ever disappoints, I'll definitely fail over to Bing, but those days will be few and far between.
(And I do have a few presentation nits with Bing. I've seen a sponsored links block inserted ~250ms after the results rendered, immediately shifting the result positions and interrupting my skimming of the page. I can't open image results in tabs using Chrome, and their content wrapping for image results, Wikipedia pages, etc. feels a bit heavy-handed).
To be honest, I've felt Google has been 'babying' me too much in the last year. I've had part of my queries dropped, different intent inferred and weird verb stemming applied to my searches. In the last 6 months there have been at least a dozen occasions where I've felt the results are total crap for no good reason.
(mind you, that's out of 15,000 searches according to my Google search history)
There's also the general problem of too many commercial pages when you're trying to get information, not a product. However Bing, et al, seems to suffer from the same thing.
(eg, try finding out information about the Shoreline Amphitheatre VIP lounge experience. There are sites out there which discuss it, but it took a ridiculous number of permutations of search terms to finally find them)
Yes, one of the few major problems I have with Google is that it just changes your query sometimes when you really want what you typed, and the slight change (adding an "s", most often, for me) swamps the results you're looking for in a sea of unrelated stuff. Even using quotes doesn't help here, though it should. I'll try to remember to use Bing for those kinds of queries when I run into one again.
I'm not so sure. Don't forget that IE has larger market share than the rest put together. There's a lot of ways MS could leverage their existing monopolies to bind search in. Maybe context searching from MS Office documents, putting a Bing search box on the Windows 7 taskbar...
If Bing is "good enough", then Google could have a big problem.
Who says it didn't? Maybe Google's marketshare (near monopoly?) would be even more unassailable had it not been for Microsoft's (near) monopoly in the browser space.
I honestly cannot think of a time in the past year where Google has failed to locate sufficiently relevant information for a given query. If Google ever disappoints, I'll definitely fail over to Bing, but those days will be few and far between.
(And I do have a few presentation nits with Bing. I've seen a sponsored links block inserted ~250ms after the results rendered, immediately shifting the result positions and interrupting my skimming of the page. I can't open image results in tabs using Chrome, and their content wrapping for image results, Wikipedia pages, etc. feels a bit heavy-handed).