On Friday, a few of you were confusing Bing – the search engine – with a browser. I want to clear up what bing is, what a browser is, and how they, or any search engine, can be used.

Bing is a search engine like Google or Yahoo or Ask; really nothing more than a webpage. You can use it in any browser you’d like. Whether you use Firefox, or Chrome, or Internet Explorer, or Opera, or Safari, or any other browser, if you type in www.bing.com the browser you are using will take you to Bing’s home page. Likewise, if you type www.google.com you will be taken to Google’s page, regardless of the browser you are using.

Below are screenshots of Google and Bing in various browsers, so you can see that it’s the same regardless of which browser you choose. (Blogger doesn’t let me align them horizontally, so this is the best I can give you).

I was going to include Internet Explorer and Safari, but to be blunt it would look exactly the same; it would just be Google and Bing in that browser.

The search engine you choose, whether it’s Google or Bing or whatever, is independent of the browser you use to view it.