> I had not considered Bing a serious competitor to Google's search engine until now.
I can’t tell how much humor was intended here, but that’s a serious competitive point that had not occurred to me. Ever. It’s not something that MS could use in a marketing campaign, but could easily sway lots of people to give it a try when they otherwise wouldn’t.
Its image search is also pretty good. If I'm not successful on a google image search, bing usually comes up with quality images. Their maps also tend to better render local businesses and it's easier to navigate the results than google, surprisingly. On the other hand technical searches are way better on google.
That’s likely on purpose now, even if it was accidental in the beginning. Microsoft marketing people are not stupid, and they know the right amount of piracy and the right amount of porn is excellent marketing.
