>Except Google was heavily dependent on funding from various branches of the USG in its early stages. Search for it.
But that funding could have came from anywhere. Just because the government funded something, doesn't mean that the thing would never be funded if the government didn't fund it.
>Thats debatable. Any blind studies?
Entirely anecdotal, but I've never met anyone who tried Bing and didn't switch back to Google after finding it flounders with more complex searches.
I'm not sure how one'd go about designing such a study, to avoid favouring one search engine by inadvertently testing queries it's more suited to (or picking people who make queries more suited to one than the other). Or how quality of results would be measured.
One somewhat empirical measure: Google has a much larger market share.
