Do you still Google?

Or do you already Bing?

Odds are: The former rather than the latter.

First things first: As far as I am concerned, Bing does not seem to lend itself naturally to being used as a verb. Binging the web, maybe? Web-binging? Doesn't roll of the tongue. But then again, when Google was chosen as a company name, being in the Oxford Dictionary was probably not on the top of the list of what the founders where after either.

In any case, the exciting news was the other day, that Bing has made it in at Number 2 in the list of most used search engines. While this is impressive, the small print revealed that in terms of search engine usage, there is Google, and then there is nothing for a VERY long time. Being Number 2 means that you have a market share of about 2%.

Nevertheless, exciting enough to test drive the new Bing on the Block. Rumour has it that its strength is the image search.

I did what every respectable tester would do and googled (sorry, binged) my name as search term. And voila, it came up with a picture of me and my son. Apart from the fact that I didn't like that in terms of privacy, it turned out to be my own fault since it happened to be a Facebook profile picture.

Nevertheless much closer to the truth than a picture of some red chilli peppers that Google came up with. Taken by a photographer who shares my name.

And indeed much better than Cuil which chooses not to know me at all. This very non-representative sample of one explains however why the latter seems to have already joined Altavista on the scrapyard of Search Engines.

Time will tell whether Microsoft has finally scored some points on the web. I guess there's only a factor of 40 in terms of market share to go.