Microsoft Bing – is this some kind of trick?

My IE 8 update somehow injected Bing into my life. I don’t use IE 8 all that much, so I left it there and I’ve been playing with it over the past 10 days or so.

Wow.

Bing really stinks. Their algorithms are tightly bound to large marketing-heavy commercial sites that are potential advertisers. Bing feels like a “pay-to-play” strategy. For my purposes these sites are rarely useful. Bing works pretty well for searching Microsoft’s material, but not significantly better than Google.

So is Bing the best Microsoft can manage, or is there some kind of deeper ploy at work?

I can’t figure out what the heck they’re trying to do here. Maybe Microsoft has Google stock options and they’re trying to boost Google’s share price?

PS. To change search providers click on the IE 8 drop down next to the magnifying glass link (top right) then choose “Find More Providers …” then scroll down a ways to find Google Search suggestions (if they could move it lower on the page they would …). I do give full credit to Microsoft for one thing. With a few clicks you can completely remove Bing from the IE Add-ons Search Providers list and you can make Google the default including search suggestion handling.