I’m switching to Microsoft Live Search. I’ve changed the default search engine in my browser and I vow to use it as my primary search engine from now on. And I think my reasons for doing it are worth sharing here.

First, make no mistake: I’m not a Microsoft fan and I never was. I was a Linux evangelist about 12-10 years ago and I’m an avid Apple and Mozilla user now. I think MS’s operating systems suck and always did – they are in fact responsible for entrenching bad software as a standard and degrading people’s expectations about software quality in general. And as a company they are as bad as you can get.

So I’m not doing it because I love Microsoft or because I think Live Search is a better search engine. I’m just fed up with Google – and also a bit concerned: my concern is that relying exclusively on Google’s search results affects my worldview too much.

Google has a de-facto monopoly on web search. Therefore everyone fights (with all kinds of SEO techniques) to be on top of Google’s ranking (because almost no one looks further). The effect is that on the first page of Google’s results you are more likely to find someone actively pushing his mediocre content than people who just have good content and no active “SEO strategy”. Also, Google has been known to censor its search results in the past. No matter what reasons they have and whether I agree with them by doing so they try to shape the worldview of millions – including mine – by removing some sites and through that some points of view. Now, that is not ok.

So, I want to see the world through a different lens – not necessarily a fundamentally better one, but at least a different one. And I’ll be actively encouraging others to do the same thing – not necessarily switch to Live Search, but at least throw away Google-Matrix glasses and look at the web from different angles.