It wasn’t that long ago that Yahoo was the biggest internet company, but now it seems like they won’t be around for long. Google and Bing are the two major players now, and both are trying to outdo each other. I think that having to choose between Microsoft and Google isn’t exactly much of a choice, but at least there is some real competition now.
Microsoft probably isn’t as powerful as they once were, but they still have the monopoly on a large part of the PC market. I don’t think Bing is a particularly good search engine, but it’s better than the old MSN one ever was.
Bing is also a lot better than Yahoo. In fact, I believe they have now combined their results, so if you search Yahoo you’ll actually get Bing. I’m not sure whether this has happened yet, but it definitely will at some point.
Google is sometimes difficult to like, but it does provide good products. I use the search engine, Gmail, Google docs and various other apps almost every day.
Yes, it’s a bit worrying that Google has so much access to my data, but when they provide the best products it’s difficult to ignore. The search engine is still superior to any others in my opinion, although that could change in the coming years.
I don’t like Google instant though. If I start typing a search term that’s more than a few words, I don’t want the process slowed by completely irrelevant results. It’s a gimmick and nothing more. In fact, I’ve already turned it off. I’m sure it will be refined and get better over time, but who wants to wait for that?
I think a bit of competition in the search engine marketplace is a good thing. Other engines like Ask and Wolfram Alpha seem to have fallen away, especially after such a fuss was made over the latter. It’s a good idea, but it has a long way to go before it can be used for anything other than getting quick statistics about something.
So for the foreseeable future I’ll be using Google. Definitely keep an eye on Bing though, it may make more of an impact than most people expect.