What a surprise — for the first time I got search results surfed by Microsoft's Bing search engine. And I did not even intend that. All I wanted to do was to find a particular project for a Wave client (software) I read about on the Web. I typed my query into the address bar, hit enter, and got these results below.
Not necessarily what I was looking for. But wait a second …
Why didn't Firefox serve the result from Google as usually?
Well, I played around with Bing a tiny bit, right when Microsoft had launched their new search service but I did not stick with it for long. Honestly, Google is my most favorite search engine. Period. Google did not only catch me for search, but with a plethora of other great applications. From Gmail, to Google Docs, AdWords, … to their translation tool, and … Wave is the latest on the list. They hooked me up. Probably for life.
So I was quite surprised that I suddenly got Bing results displayed.
What has happened?
I remember that I had updated my
Alexa Sparky add-on for Firefox this week. I also remember having seen a note about new features but I kind of ignored it. Now, it's obvious what had happened. Alexa Sparky is one of the
FireFox Add-ons I use.
Two new settings for Alexa
With the latest version of the plugin you can have Alexa …
- handle error cases like “Error 404: Page Not Found,”
- and Searches.
No options for configuring what search engine to use though. At least I did not find any but Alexa’s default seems to be
Bing (↑).
Sorry, Alexa.
Sorry, Microsoft.
I just have deactivated both settings.
I'm back at Google.
And here is why. The first search result, and even the second one is exactly what I was looking for.
Of course, you can come up with cases in which Bing gets more relevant results up-front, but as I said,
“Google has already ‘hooked’ me.”
I will continue to use the add-on for having the
Alexa rank of websites displayed but I don’t allow it to take control of my browser.
Yours
John W. Furst
http://blog.fcon21.biz/comment.php?type=trackback&entry_id=285