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It's a bleak time to be in the search industry.
Google has not been getting the best attention in the press, lately. The Justice Department has been going head to head with the popular search engine giant — and popular it is indeed, with more than 90% of search engine market share. That leaves less than 10% for all the other search engines combined. Bing, the second most widely used search engine, is the runner up but in rank only, at between 3 and 4 percent market share.
Well, for a long time, I have been part of that 4% minority. Until this week, that is. After more than a decade, Bing is no longer my primary search engine.
To understand why I stopped using Bing, it's worth discussing why I started using it in the first place. Like they were for many people, for me, at one point Internet Explorer was synonymous with "the web", Google with "web search". The late 2000s saw the arrival of many decent browser alternatives to Internet Explorer, which I eventually stopped using for the most part (though I still use it occasionally for certain things, even now). The late 2000s and early 2010s were also an interesting time for search. Google was, even then, a deeply entrenched part of many people's lives, and competitors like Microsoft's Bing sought to change that by any tactic possible. Remember the Scroogled campaign? Yes, it's no surprise that Google is watching what you do. These days, however, it would be naïve to think that Microsoft wasn't, either!
Bing Rewards (now Microsoft Rewards), launched in 2010, is a rewards program that essentially pays users to use their search engine. Of course, there are caveats to this, and the overall concept is not particularly unique either — Swagbucks is another rewards program that also happens to have a search engine which they also pay users to use. However, at the time, it was very compelling. Most of us make many web searches in a day already, so why not get paid to do the things that we already do? Sure, Microsoft would spy on you, but for most people, the alternative was letting Google spy on you, and not getting compensated for it, which is arguably an even more rotten deal.
So eventually, I made the leap, and switched to Bing. Over the years, this has been a lucrative choice; I have cashed out hundreds of dollars in gift cards while expending virtually no effort to earn them. Initially, my preference for Bing was because of the financial incentive, but it was also an excercise in seeing if it would be a choice that I could live with in the long run. It turned out that it was. Amazingly, I found that, at least personally, in many cases, I preferred Bing's search results to Google's, even in blind tests. (Remember the Pepsi Challenge? Well, there also used to be a Bing Challenge!) The search relevants were ordered in a more relevant way to me. I preferred Bing Maps to Google Maps - an innovative feature that Bing had at the time was showing you a floor plan of shopping malls integrated right in Bing Maps, which really kicked it up a notch from Google Maps. Over time, I became sold that Bing was arguably a better search engine than Google, and I would have continued using it, even if I were not getting paid to.
However, this was already the early and soon mid 2010s, which meant that before long, Microsoft's best days were behind it. In recent years, I've noticed that Bing's results have been merely "comparable" to Google's. Sometimes, I would make a search using Bing and, if I didn't find what I was looking for, repeat it using Google, just to make sure I wasn't missing something. Ten years ago, this was almost never the case. Bing's results at the time, in my opinion, were hands down as good or even better than Google's, at least for the searches I happened to be making.
Well, today, that is no longer the case.
In the last year or two, Bing has suffered a precipitous drop in quality. As a long time Bing user now, this change caught me by surprise. I was using Bing for several reasons and yes, one was partly Because It's Not Google. But suddenly, there was a massive increep of mediocrity to which I was not accustomed from the search engine. And very quickly, the dominoes began to fall down to the point where I no longer have any compelling reason to use Bing, whether I want to or not. After a decade of great search results, what changed?
The first red flag was when Bing bought into the "Generative AI" fad that has caught the tech industry by storm and is holding it by the horns. I must admit here that my opinion is somewhat biased here. I have never used ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot and have no interest in ever using them, or any other generative AI concotion. However, Bing decided to take the route of aggressively trying to shove it down everyone's throats, whether they wanted to or not. Even now, the second "tab" on Bing Search is, no, not images, not videos, not maps, not news — it's Copilot! Yes, your handy dandy Bing AI assistant! Which is really great if you want that kind of stuff, I suppose. But I very much did not want that kind of stuff, and Bing very aggressively tried to work it into any search that it could. Searches would start of innocently enough. However, if you ended up scrolling back up to the top of the page, which I often did when I wanted to tweak my search query slightly, as soon as you scrolled to the top of the page, "Copilot" would activate and take over the entire page, literally! Bing Search would completely give way to Bing Copilot, which would take your search query and automatically start responding to it, even though I'd never asked it to! What's more, it was not trivial to dismiss and get back to what I was doing. If I tried going back to "search", I would lose my query and have to start all over again! This could easily waste ten seconds in a single search, for no reason at all! It seems like Microsoft took a leaf out of Windows 10's playbook and tried to actively make it harder for people to do the same thing that they had used to be able to do with no issue at all! This seems to be a classic affliction of tech companies these days, which seemingly have no real contributions to make anymore so they fabricate solutions to problems that nobody had. This was a great example of just that.
Well, Copilot be damned, I didn't want anything to do with it. However, Bing provided no way to disable this incredibly annoying functionality which, even if it was not "opt-in", should at the very least have provided an "opt-out". But did they do that? No! Instead, they just forced Copilot on frustrated users whenever they scrolled to the top of the page, like a drunk college student that doesn't know that "no means no". Actually, that's a bit unfair — I think drunk college students have a better track record of understanding that "no means no" than Bing.
In recent months, the problems have only compounded. At some point in the past couple months, whenever I navigated search results pages in Bing, the next page of results would open in a new tab, even though I had not requested it to do so. It would be one thing if this were an occasional nuisance. However, this was a constant occurance for me. Unlike the typical search engine user, which I would posit makes many fairly shallow search queries, I tend not to use search engines a great deal, but when I do, it often tends to be for researching relatively obscure stuff, where I may very well literally go through every page of results because there are so few of them. As a result, after a single search query, I would suddenly end up with 10 or 15 extra tabs open in my browser and then have to go and close them all. Needless to say, I was not impressed with this new "feature".
Eventually, I figured out if I disabled JavaScript on Bing, that would prevent page navigation from opening a new tab. Go figure, trust Microsoft to screw up its JavaScript, as usual. A side benefit of this was that it also disabled the Copilot crap, and made Bing at least somewhat palatable again. But Bing continued to find more ways to strike back.
One phenomenon I began noticing more was that if I hadn't made a search in a while, searches would "hang" for a little bit before completing. In retrospect, I think it was DNS (I'm not going to make the usual crack that it's always DNS, because for me, it's usually TLS instead). Nonetheless, it bears asking why a large tech conglomerate can't get its DNS records in order. Whatever the cause, an additional few second delay multiple times a day in getting search results doesn't do anything to sweeten the deal for me.
All these things have made a very frustrated Bing user in the past year, though individually, I am not sure they would have pushed me over the edge. But the final straw for me was realizing that Bing's search results had of late decayed in a hot steamy mess. This calendar year, I've increasingly found myself making a search using Bing, not finding what I was looking for, repeating it using Google, and finding it. At this point, I'm sure the loyal Googlers out there are saying, "Well, duh!" However, it bears repeating that this did not used to be the case. In its heyday, Bing's results were very good, as good or dare I say better than Google's. However, at some point — when exactly, I know not, but I would posit it to be some point in the past couple years — Bing's results have declined to the point that they are no longer anywhere close to as good as Google's. These days, they are far worse.
It's almost as if the past year, Bing employees have been trying as hard as they possibly can to get people to dump Bing and switch to a different search engine. While that is laughably implausible, they have succeeded nonetheless. After more than a decade, I, a longtime Bing user, am no longer using the Bing search engine. After all, if I'm just going to have to repeat my search using Google, why not just do that to begin with?
Google has widely been accused of "enshittification". While I am no fan of Google, by any means, I think Bing has done a much better job at demonstrating this in the past year than Google has, over any time interval. It's not even a close comparison. While it's hard for me to speak to a decline in Google's search results in recent times, given that I mostly stopped using it more than a decade ago, it's almost certainly marginal compared to the cliff that Bing has fallen off in the past year alone.
I don't think this bodes well for the search engine industry. As the runner up to Google, Bing was in the best position to provide a real alternative to it, which it used to but seems poised to no longer. People that are not using Google for whatever reason are unlikely to be impressed with the games that Bing is playing with its users these days. The fact that the runner up in search has practically combusted in the past year leaves fewer options than ever available for those looking for an alternative to "being scroogled". And while the privacy-respecting search engines out there can certainly be a great choice for users, too (e.g. DuckDuckGo, StartPage, etc.), most of these use Google or Bing's results under the hood, so in fact, there is much less competition in search than most people realize. While I am skeptical the Justice Department's case against Google will change much in the long term, it is, as it was in the early 2010s, an interesting time in the search engine space. However, one thing is different now. The 2010s were a time of hopeful optimism, about the future of search and the alternatives that were available and the freedom they could provide. Sadly, these days, the prospects for search are far more bleak, and we are presented with an illusion of choice, a choice of which posion we want to pick.
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