I'd rather have better results than faster results. Faster is only important once you have the quality problem worked out, first make it good and then make it fast has been a long time mantra. The reason is that it is usually very expensive to make something really fast because optimizing code is hard and expensive (case in point they use custom hardware here).

The upside is that they're doing something innovative but if Bing really wants to steal marketshare from Google they have to improve on their quality, not on their speed. I'd rather see them take 10 seconds and deliver an absolutely perfect answer than 0.001 second and deliver something not on par with Google but 10 times faster.

Impressive to see them backing an exotic solution like this though, and if and when they do get it to be better than Google it may pay off.

Are there any developments like this underway at Google?