Bing is not so awful.

Actually, I like Bing better than I thought I would; for one thing, the background pictures :-)

Also Microsoft is very generous with providing free REST style search and spelling APIs (it took about 2 minutes to write a Ruby client, which I posted here http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/06/ruby-client-for-search-an...)

I am pretty much "anti Microsoft", but I try to not be dogmatic about it :-)