That’s right. Microsoft is going to try to conquer Google, by playing Google’s game, on Google’s terms, in Google’s market, in the uphill battle against name recognition. In a world where “google it” has become the English language equivalent for doing an online search, Microsoft has decided to invest one hundred million dollars into Bing.

Bing. Yes, it’s called Bing. And I can’t help thinking there’s a “Bing Is Not Google” acronym hiding in there. Dude, you can’t beat Google by naming your web site after Google!

Well, whatever. As Mark Hurst puts it:

Everything Microsoft has tried recently hasn’t worked. They tried the “I’m a PC” ads, a knockoff of the Mac ads – didn’t work. Tried the Zune, a knockoff of the iPod – didn’t work. Tried redoing MSN Search again and again, as a knockoff of Google – didn’t work. What’s the world coming to, when Microsoft can’t build a monopoly around a knockoff?

It’s those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience.

So we’ll see the MS hype for five minutes. All the nerds will try Bing for the next week. But in the end, we’ll all be using Google.

But at least Microsoft is doing something to stimulate the economy.

• No menu bar They’ve taken the application-ness out of the application, and turned it into a direct-to-web browsing experience. This change also leaves more screen real estate for the actual web sites to be viewed without scrolling.
• Less clutter Not only is there no menu bar, but there’s also no status bar, no search box, and with the exception of the start page, there’s no favorites toolbar. It’s a sleek, experience-centric design that reminds me of browsing on the iPhone.
• One box In true Google fashion, everything can be done from one text input box: navigating, searching, opening a bookmark, etc.
• Incognito browsing This is the first time I’ve seen such a straightforward way of surfing the web without leaving a trail. While most web browsers offer cleanup after the fact, Chrome’s incognito window never creates a trail to begin with. I think this is something that most people want, but which might scare managers and parents who want to know what their employees or children are doing online. This may be the one controversial feature of Chrome.
• Fast, attractive rendering Being built on top of Apple’s WebKit browser framework, Chrome loads pages super-fast, and renders them beautifully.

After messing around in Chrome for a few minutes, my experience is basically positive. To a certain extent, I miss the extensibility of Firefox, but at the same time I’m tempted to prefer not having it, due to the incredible performance bloat that occurs once you install a bunch of add-ons. Still, I’d like to be able to hide ads the way Adblock lets me in Firefox. Still, it supports Flash, so apparently there is some extensibility in place already.

I think I’m going to spend the next week or so using Chrome as my main browser and get an idea of how I really feel about it.

Paul Boutin doesn’t seem to think it’s so fast or easy, though. He spent half an hour speed dialing GOOG-411 and trying various searches.

The verdict: Fail. At least until I can interrupt the redundant intro blurbs by immediately speaking a city and business name. Those seconds count, especially while driving.

I decided to give it a try for myself. After all, it’s free, right?

The prerecorded voice didn’t bother me the first time. In fact it all seemed rather efficient. But the strange thing is that when I called back a second time, the voice irritated me. I find myself agreeing with Boutin’s assessment.

A simple interface — the very brand of Google — is what their 411 service seems to be missing. Sure, the underlying technology is great. But perfection of design is found not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.

As a side note, on one of my calls to GOOG-411, I tried asking for Spanish language support. The speech recognition didn’t understand my first two attempts, and on the third try it wanted to connect me to El Paso, TX. I’m going to assume that Google isn’t supporting other languages at this time.

I’m doing Google searches all the time. Whenever I have a question about anything, I don’t hesitate to grab my laptop and look it up on Google. If I had to go to Google.com, wait for the site to load, and click in the search box before I could type in my query and search, it would slow me down.

After reading that, you probably think I’m crazy. But yes, that little bit of extra work would slow me down. I search a lot!

So what is my more efficient solution? It’s simple: Firefox bookmark keywords. If you don’t understand them, I recommend that you go look at the LifeHacker article about them.

I’ve published some of my more useful search shortcuts here. Firefox users can simply right-click on the link and choose Bookmark This Link. Then, go into Organize Bookmarks and add keywords to them. I also recommend grouping the search shortcuts into a folder called Search to keep some sanity in the Bookmark menu.

Google Search – keyword: gg
Google Maps – keyword: map
Google Image Search – keyword: img
IMDB Lookup – keyword: imdb
Dictionary – keyword: dc
Thesaurus – keyword: th
Wikipedia – keyword: wiki

After saving the bookmarks, don’t forget to add the keywords. The shortcuts are useless without them. Oh, and if you don’t use Firefox, you’re out of luck.

With the shortcuts, you can now go to the address bar and type gg britney spears to learn everything you want to know about annoying pop singers. But that would be useless.

More useful would be, when you’re looking at the web site for a local sushi restaurant and you see their address on the page, you could copy it from the page and paste it into the address bar, typing map before it, so you have something like map 401 N Michigan Ave Chicago. Just a few keystrokes gets you the directions you’re looking for.

With email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet, and now presentation software, Google has essentially created a free, online version of Microsoft Office. While none is as feature-rich as the commercial Microsoft product, they are all quite capable — certainly good enough for me in almost every case.

And Google offers collaboration abilities that Microsoft (to my knowledge) does not. Most of the confusing menus in the MS Office programs are things I shall never use, but the collaboration and sharing of Google documents is something I do use currently.

Now the question is, will it make a difference? I’m sure that large corporations, for example, will keep up with Microsoft Office, keeping current versions and staying up-to-date on licensing. But there are a lot of small businesses (90% of businesses are small businesses) out there that can’t afford, or can’t justify, buying new versions of all their software every year, and they can’t keep up with the complicated licensing.

Since I, for one, don’t own or use Microsoft Office at home, I have turned to alternatives. Open Office is quite good, but it’s huge and slow, and for the purpose of creating a document or spreadsheet, I already find myself turning easily to Google Docs for speed and simplicity.

And that’s the bottom line for me. Whether or not Google has any impact on Microsoft’s bottom line is irrelevant, because they’ve already succeeded by creating a suite of online apps that handle all of my daily online tasks. And I’m not alone.

Okay, so it took me a little while to come around to Google Reader, and I think they’ve changed some stuff since the first time I tried it, but I’m now convinced.

Keeping up with a large number of web sites became easy to do with the introduction of RSS… and now, thanks to Google Reader, it’s easy to do from anywhere, rather than being stuck with the settings only on your home computer, or work computer.

I became a GMail believer immediately after trying it, and while I don’t think the documents are a replacement for MS Office just yet, I like the ability to share them. Now, with Reader, Google is easily becoming the home of my online experience.

If you haven’t tried it yet, or don’t understand RSS, it’s simple. You find the little “feed” icon () on the page you are looking for, right-click on it and copy the link, and then paste that into Google reader.

Firefox users have it even easier, because any page with an RSS feed will also have that icon in the address bar at the top. The first time you click that icon, you will be asked to choose your RSS tool. Pick Google. From then on, every time you click that icon, you will be prompted to add the feed to Google Reader.

It works for blogs, news sites, sports sites, and even Flickr photostreams. Finally, you can keep up with all your friends without having to go visit every web site every time.

It’s also a good way for obsessed stalkers to get back some of their valuable time, so they can keep an eye on their ex while still managing to get some work done at the office.