Bing and Aviate
On my Android phone, I use the homescreen replacement app Aviate, which was bought out by Yahoo! at the beginning of last year. A little while ago, Aviate added a search bar at the top of the main screen, not dissimilar to the search box in the stock launcher.
Funny thing about Aviate’s search, though: it uses Bing. I didn’t realize this until I had been using the search widget for several days, and I had had nothing but good experiences every time I used it.
I like to think I’m mature enough to not have bias against something based solely on its name. Bing has gotten a bad rap, but my experience here has been positive enough that I don’t mind using it. I’m entrenched enough in Google’s ecosystem that I’m not changing my browser’s default search to Bing anytime soon, but on the other hand, I certainly don’t mind using it on my phone.
Bing and Windows 10 Technical Preview
Some time ago, I had installed the Windows 10 Technical Preview on my laptop. Well, it’s my wife’s laptop, but she defers to me on matters of computers in general. Plus, she’s given me free reign on the laptop, so that’s cool.
Anyway, I’ve been happy as a pig in mud playing around with Windows 10. Cortana, like Siri and Google Now, totes itself as a helpful assistant. There’s a nice little quick search thingy (that’s the technical term) in the taskbar for quick searching, and I’ve grown quite attached to it.
As you’d expect, the search is powered by Bing. Since I’ve been using that to do a lot of web searches (and it supports voice activation too, so that’s pretty cool), I’ve been using Bing a lot more on the laptop.
You can look at it as kind of a forced switch, I suppose. I still use Chrome as my main browser — mostly because of the extensions I use, plus there’s no support for Inbox outside of Chrome — but my respect for Internet Explorer has been renewed of late, as well.
I haven’t quite moved away from Google yet, but I’m getting there. As Chrome becomes more and more bloated, I’m entertaining thoughts of switching it out for a faster browser. IE, even as it exists now, certainly fits that bill. And when the Spartan browser becomes available, you can bet I’ll be checking that out, too.
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