It appears to me that the positive/negative opinions of Microsoft and Google strongly correlate to whether you have a business or end-user relationship. End users tend to have a more positive opinion of Google over Microsoft. Folks doing business with the companies seem to prefer Microsoft.
From an end-user perspective, Bing has done itself a disservice by being poor at producing relevant search results for too long. Many users have tried them at some point, and formed the conclusion that "Google is better than Bing". The vast majority of Google users find Google to be very good at providing the search results they need, so there's little motivation to go look for a better provider.
Even if Bing produces "better" search results than Google, it'll take a long time to get folks to change. If Google's "good enough" for most folks, and most folks already have the bit set that "Google is better than Bing", there's little motivation for change.
Well... I'd be somewhat of an exception to that. I'm not too fond of Google as an end user, either. Here's why:
1. The search results aren't as relevant as they used to be. I get more link farms than I should; and "big," well-known content providers are favored over smaller content providers, even if the content provided by the smaller providers is more current and relevant. They have devalued freshness of content in favor of the size of a site.
For example, once in a while I need an answer to sort of technical question related to some technology I use, usually along the lines of why a script that used to work suddenly doesn't. Most time it's because some update or security patch that I missed broke my code, and I need to narrow the problem down so I can fix the problem. If my usual geek forums don't yield an answer, I search for it using search engines.
If I search on Google, I'll get dozens -- sometimes hundreds -- of results from years ago just because they happen to be from well-known sites. The fresh answer that I need usually is more likely to be on some relatively unknown site by some unknown geek who had the same problem, and was nice enough to post the solution, on some unknown but excellent forum; but because he's just some unknown geek on some unloved forum, his answer will be on page 37.
2. The user history and geolocation data-mining is hurting the relevancy of the search results. The results you get and the results I get on identical searches usually will not be the same. I have posted examples of this before, including screenshots.
If you're a heavy Google user who usually is logged in to Google, try doing a search and taking a screenshot. Then log in through a proxy server using your browser's "private" browsing mode and compare the results. There's at least a 50-50 chance that your results will be different.
3. There are too many different sorts of monetized results. Adwords I can deal with, and once in a while the ads will be relevant. I also don't blame Google for the irrelevant Adwords ads because the advertisers are the ones who specified the keywords.
But then you have Google Shopping and paid ads from eBay, NexTag, and so forth polluting the page, as well, before the organic results. Hey, everyone's trying to make money, so I don't blame Google for doing so, as well. But enough already. Sometimes almost the whole first page is ads. When the ads exceed the content, that's problematic for me.
4. I am sick and tired of Google asking me for my cell phone number. They're not getting it. Period. Most of family members don't have my cell phone number.
One time Google actually locked me out of my account for refusing to give them a cell number. No matter what I did, I couldn't get past that page. So I got a free Pinger number and gave that to them.
If I didn't have a business relationship with Google, I would have closed the account altogether.
5. Panda and Penguin are from the Pit of Hell. Rather than -- heaven forbid -- having a human being look at suspected link farms and other search spamming, Google deputized robots to do it.
Not only does this punish innocent site owners for links that OTHER PEOPLE posted to their sites (which comes more under the heading of business reasons to hate Google), but it also makes the results less relevant. Yes, there are link spammers, forum spammers, link farms, and the like. But there also are a lot of people who post links on forums because they point to truly outstanding sites and/or because they're dead-on relevant to the the topic of a post.
Even in my own case, I like embedding in-line images in posts on this forum that are about cooking and such, or because my post is of a sequential nature and I like to have the pictures spaced out with the content, or just because I think the embedding looks better than uploading the photos. But it's gotten to the point that I'm hesitant to embed pictures from any site except one of my own for fear of getting some other site owner penalized for spam links.
Humans can tell in a heartbeat the difference between links posted because they're relevant, and links posted as spam. But heaven forbid that Google should actually have a human look at these sorts of things.
Meh. That's enough. I could talk for days about all the ways how Google killed my love for them. But I won't. It just annoys me -- and probably everyone else.
-Rich
