Bill Gates On Google: “Bing Is The Better Product”

Photo by ToddABishop via Creative Commons.

It’s been more than four years since Bill Gates worked full-time at Microsoft, but he’s still promoting Bing, the company’s 3+-year-old search engine.

Gates, who’s still serving as Microsoft’s non-executive chairman but is focused full-time today on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, promoted Bing during an “Ask Me Anything” conversation today on Reddit. It happened when Reddit user “Fozzy420″ asked Gates, “Do you guys really use Bing? I mean seriously…” That prompted this Gates reply:

Seriously Bing is the better product at this point. Try the challenge. I am biased but the work to make Bing better has been amazing.

Gates didn’t really answer the question about which search engine he uses. The “challenge” he’s referring to is Bing It On, Bing’s effort to woo new searchers by doing side-by-side search results comparisons against Google. That’s been going since last September. After about a month, Bing announced that 33 percent of Google users said they plan to use Bing more often after taking the challenge.

Which search engine is better is a subjective debate, but the majority of searchers continue to vote by using Google. Bing has made small-but-consistent gains since its launch, but still commands only about 16 percent of US search market share and far less in worldwide market share.

(tip via BGR)