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Comment by warwick | Hacker News Reader

I've also switched my browsers search bar over to Bing. Overall, I prefer it to Google. Random notes:

- Searching for Cocoa class names doesn't give me the API reference as the first result. This is the one thing that's been annoying me.

- The image search has a nifty infinite scroll thing going on. This makes scanning through results quite a bit faster.

- I like the picture, to the extent that I tend to visit the Bing homepage just after midnight, even if I don't need to search. It's not utilitarian, but it gives Bing a flavour Google is often lacking.

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I agree. I often go to Bing atleast once a day to see what pic have they put up. They have great taste specially when constrained to a limited size.

Seriously? The picture is one of the main reasons I don't like it. I find the google logo changes to usually be really interesting and clever, whilst the selection of random clip-art at bing to be a bit crass, and distracting.

I think you and I have very different definitions of clip art.

I like the photos, personally.

You can just turn it off with http://www.bing.com/?rb=0 and on with http://www.bing.com/?rb=1

I would like to see Bing do some more interesting things with this image to make it seem more like a personalised search engine.

For example, since Bing integrates with Live accounts, I'd suspect there is obviously some recording of previous searches by MS to help deliver better results.

Privacy issues aside, I think it might be quite clever for Bing's background image to be more customised to what you might enjoy based off your previous searching history.

EG, say I searched for puppies and dogs more often than the average person, having more cute puppy pictures as my background might make the engine be more appealing to me, even though I wouldn't know it directly.

I like the picture too. Now I have a longer list of places I want to visit.

On the other hand, I switched to Bing since day one and I was a happy user for the first week or so, but lately I find myself going back to Google too often. Does anyone else feels like the quality of results in Bing has been degrading?

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