Before we start, I would like to explain to you how you’ve ended up with Bing instead of the search engine you are used to. Microsoft deployed a new version of Internet Explorer (IE8) over Windows Update, and by default it had its homepage set to Bing.com. This means that if you had it set to automatically install updates for you, or manually chose to upgrade, after you were done you had Bing.com set as your homepage.  It is also possible that you were using Microsoft’s Live Search as your search engine which was replaced by Bing.

Now that we have that out of the way, here is how you set your homepage back to your prefered engine.  For these examples I will be using Google however you are free to use you’re favourite.

First start up Internet Explorer, if your home page comes up as Bing.com immediately then you need to change the default engine.  If you are only getting directed to Bing after searching from your search bar then skip to the next part of this guide.

On the main menu, select Tools and then Internet Options.

In the highlighted box you will see that your home page has been set to http://www.bing.com, simply change that to your desired engine and hit OK.  Now if you need to change the default engine for your search bar, click the drop down arrow next to the magnifying glass and you should see Google in that drop down list.  If not, you will have to hit “Find more providers…” and select it from the page you are presented with.

Alternate Method:

Since a few people have been unsuccessful with the method above I wanted to provide antoher method that will work on any browser.  Open up My Computer and go to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc and open the file hosts.  It should ask what you want to use to open it, just select Notepad.  Then add the bottom add:

74.125.127.100 www.bing.com
74.125.127.100 bing.com

Now save the file, and restart your web-browser if it is still running. Now when your browser tries to go to Bing.com it will be directed to Google instead.

That’s all there is to it, you are now free of Bing!

I noticed an interesting trend today when looking at they keywords searched that lead people to my site.  The majority of them were regarding Bing, and not one of them was positive.  Looks like people just aren’t very happy with Bing.

Search Term
disable bing
i hate bing
bing google
bing sucks
but its not google
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how to disable bing
bing … all this hype and it sucks
bing or google
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get rid of bing
who is bing.com
bing is stupid
get rid of bing
dont want bing how to remove
i don’t link bing
ubuntu 8.10 upgrade 8.10 to 9.04 is it safe?
is bing any different than google
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what i bing
don’t not want to use bing
i hate bing search
bing and google
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uninstall bing
bing doesn’t list my website
bing pros cons
bing impressions
background of bing.com where is it?
don’t want bing search
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bing and google searches
disable bing.com
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bing search suggestion link
i hate bing browser
what is bing.com
how to remove bing search
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how to disable bing search

Although I don’t see myself dropping Google as my default search engine, I was at least curious to see what Bing.com had to offer after all the hype that’s been going on.  Microsoft has put a lot of money into marketing Bing.com so naturally one can assume that they also spent a lot of money making it, and hopefully that money was well spent.  Since this is just a “first thoughts” post rather than get too fancy I’ll just offer a list of pros and cons based on my experience so far.  As the week goes on and I’ve had more time to play with it and compare searches with Google I will continue to write about it.

Pros

Overall, I’m impressed with what Microsoft’s done with Bing. I expected it to be as cluttered as Yahoo or the old Live Search. Instead I found a slim, sleaker version with many new bells and whistles. Both navigating the site and searching are just as quick, if not quicker than Google and the results seem to be just as relevant. But it’s going to take a lot more than just cloning Google in order to get me and the rest of the world to switch over.

As I continued to play with the site I noticed many interesting features. The most obvious being the AJAX popups for each search result that gives you a preview of its content, very handy. The infinite scrolling on the image search page didn’t impress me much as Google did that long ago with Search Mash (R.I.P.) and to be honest I don’t get why they only did it for the images and not all the pages. Another fancy, but not necessarily useful, feature is when you’re doing a video search simply hovering over a thumbnail will start playing it, then when you move your mouse it will stop.

The most talked about feature I’ve seen so far is filters/suggestions bar on the left. So for example if you were to search for “mustang” you could end up filtering for parts, accessories, sales, videos, forums, etc. Could be handy if you don’t know what you’re looking for, or don’t know how to use a search bar. But most of us are keyword wizards now and know we can search for “mustang +parts” and get our results in one swoop instead of running a search, clicking a side bar and then running another search.

Cons

When it comes to the cons, the first thing I just can’t get past is the name. I hate it. I don’t want to “bing it” any more than I want to barf. Then there’s the fact that you’re immediately presented with some ugly stock photography as their background, I don’t need to waste my bandwidth on something so bland and irrelevant.

Despite it’s many new useful tools it doesn’t provide basic calculations, such as “pounds to kilograms” or “Celsius to Fahrenheit”  which I’ve become reliant on Google for. It also seems to force you to use it’s spelling suggestions rather than specifying if you’d like to or not. So when I searched for “mustag” it just decided to give me “mustang.” In most cases this will probably satisfy people however I can think of countless times I’ve been searching for an error, or chunk of code, and I get some bizarre suggestion that I simply do NOT want to search for. So forcing me to use their suggestion is not something I am likely to embrace.

More than anything it lacks a lot of the “one stop shop” features that Google offers, such as mail, calendars, analytics, etc. Sure, they do have a link to Windows Live at the top, but they have a totally different look and feel and as a result they are a totally different experience than Bing. Not to mention navigating around any Windows Live product is a nightmare. I’ve been trying to figure out how to remove my Hotmail signature for years.

So for my overall impression of the site is exactly what I had expected, on a scale between it sucks and it’s awesome I will give it a meh. I’ll keep checking in on it, see how it progress, as it may become something special if they continue to try and improve on what we’ve accepted as being a search engine. More than anything, I just hope they manage to light a fire under Google’s ass so we can get some new features from them — as that’s where I’ll be continuing to do my searches.

Reference