Giving Google the Single Finger Salute

Gizmodo‘s Mat Honan explains why he ditched Google for Bing:

Google changed the way search works this week. It deeply integrated Google+ into search results. It’s ostensibly meant to deliver more personalized results. But it pulls those personalized results largely from Google services—Google+, Picasa, YouTube. Search for a restaurant, and instead of its Yelp page, the top result might be someone you know discussing it on Google Plus. Over at SearchEngineland, Danny Sullivan has compiled a series of damning examples of the ways Google’s new interface promotes Plus over relevancy. Long story short: It’s a huge step backwards.

And:

But I didn’t switch for political reasons, or as an act of protest. I don’t care if Google hurts Twitter or Facebook—or even Friendster for that matter. Boo-hoo. I only care if it hurts me. And this does. Google broke itself.

I switched to Bing months ago, for privacy reasons. I don’t have any accounts associated with Microsoft or Yahoo, and I never give them any personal information — not even email. That’s probably about as close to “private” as you’ll ever get on the web. Privacy isn’t a right, because it’s not something you can do. It’s merely a nice commodity you can struggle to keep a tiny bit of to yourself. That’s not easy in the digital age.

Anyway.

I noticed immediately that Bing was more like Google than Google had been since they started messing with their front end. Now, Google is messing with the back end — your search results — too.

Bing is better.