New "new" BING

I rarely express strong opinions about consumer Internet services in public, both because there's very little use to it and because I am no expert in it. This is one of the few exceptions.

I have been a big proponent of bing even after I left Microsoft. I thought they were onto something - between the design, a lot of clever HTML optimizations and semantic search capabilities I was a firm believer that bing is a better (than Google) service. I was probably one of the few bing outliers with OS X/Chrome.

It was all good until the launch of the "new" social BING. This thing is terrible. With all the popups, prompts and multiple scrolling panes I am getting dizzy. The "social" pane is jumping up and down as I am scrolling through the search results, there is so many distractions on the screen that I cannot focus on what I am really trying to accomplish. From the point of view of someone who spends quite a bit of time navigating Internet content this seems to be the "anti-search" engine. And the last thing I want is to burden my friends with my own search escapades.

Sorry Microsoft. You lost me on that one.