desideratum

A Clean, Minimal Bing

Google’s Search+ and GKBO antics have really rubbed me the wrong way over the last couple of days. So in retaliation, I’ve switched my default search engine to Bing.

It hasn’t been a frictionless switch. The quality of image results for certain search terms is mediocre. The results pages are cluttered, squished and chock full of distractions. To help the transition along, I made some tweaks to the design and encapsulated them in a user style. Most of the changes should be fairly obvious, but if you’re interested in a full changelog, I’d be happy to put one up.

To be honest, the exercise was more challenging than I expected:

Can’t stand cluttered Bing search. And after hacking away at it with Stylish, I can’t really stand the circa-2001 source code either. #fb

— Keith Chu (@Catharsis) January 14, 2012

The code and coding sensibilities were remarkably dated. For example, the wonky tab around the current center nav item was using sliding doors, combined with corner images. Pipes inserted with markup or borders. Deep, deep classitis with redundant IDs for good measure. Random markup choices. Yuck.

Anyway, this user style was created to scratch a personal itch, but hopefully you’ll find it just as useful. If you have any questions/suggestions, feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter and let me know.

Download: [User Style] Bing - Clean, Minimal (userstyles.org)