Thursday, October 31, 2013

The day I changed my default search engine from Google to Bing

We use search engines more than we use anything else on the web. Your selection of a search engine greatly affects you. I'm a Google fan and use most of their services including their very first service, search engine. This was until I decided to move to Bing.
Before you start defending the quality of your favorite search engine, I need to tell you it's not aboassociated with a t quality, it's about privacy. I recently moved to a new working environment where all machines are behind a NAT box. Without going into technical details, this means that all machines appear to the outside world as one machine. I didn't notice any difference at the beginning, but occasionally I see this message when I search for something.
This implies that Google received too many search requests from the same machine (i.e., NAT box) and they identify this as automated queries. After doing some research, I figured out that this only happens when I use the incognito mode in chrome. The reason, I guess, is that I link my Google account to Chrome. This allows Google to identify the search requests associated with a Google account and bypass the security check. I don't like that. It means that Google servers can really handle all the requests. They either want to break in my privacy or are too lazy to implement a better automatic-queries-detection technique. May be I'm wrong, but the message I got from this is 'Unless you give up some of your privacy, we'll not serve you!'
I changed the default search engine to Bing and this resolved the issue. The next step is to stop using Chrome. I'm a little bit skeptic about privacy and I'm worried about the moment they start tracking my website history.
Now I hear some questions from you. I'll try to answer them briefly here.
Q: Why Bing?
A: Don't know, don't care. I still think that Google is better in terms of quality. All other search engines are similar to me. May be because I have some friends working in Microsoft and talking about Bing. May be because I had an internship in Microsoft last year.
Q: Why search engine? Why don't you stop using all Google services and delete your account?
A: Yeah! Why not? And stop using the Internet too :) I hope I can do so but Google services are really good and I still like them. I think however that the search engine is more important. I use it more that any other service. I use it in my research. I use it to find a gift for my mom. I use it to look up the possible diseases for my symptoms. For other services, I carefully choose what to put there. It's a tradeoff between privacy and quality. I'm willing to give up some privacy to get better quality. But I'm not going to give up a lot of privacy to get only a bit better quality. If I find good alternatives to other Google services, I may go for them.