Switching from Bing to Google with a W7 Mango phone

Rating: It’s possible but not very elegant

yapf screenshot

We’re strong believers in using the right tool for the job here at GoMobile Towers. One of the niggling problems with using a W7 Mango handset such as the Nokia Lumia 800, is that the Bing search engine is integrated heavily into the mobile OS. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to switch default searching over from Bing to one of the obvious alternatives – namely, Google. This is particularly annoying if you’ve grown accustomed to the way the Google engine works and have become familiar with its idiosyncrasies. We have found a couple of ways to simplify access to Google from W7 Mango. Whilst actually being kind of impressed with Bing’s voice recognition.Of course, if there’s a means of moving away from Bingo as the default search engine buried away in Windows Phone 7.5′s (Mango’s) Settings menus, then we sure couldn’t find it.

Actually, we wonder whether enforcing Bing as the search engine isn’t breaking some kind of restraint of trade regulations here in Europe. But we digress.

One obvious thing to do fire up WP7′s Internet Explorer browser and point yourself at the Google home page you require.

Actually, when we logged into Google from the Home page, it displayed an interesting message.

Google’s web site actually displayed instructions on how to pin the Google Home page to the start as a tile. If you accept, it gives you a nice blue icon.

Then we found a free app on the Windows Phone Marketplace called yapf from ardit.B. Its described as a POI finder for both Bing and Google.

The important point is that you can chose to search with Google as your default search engine. So if you want location based information on your W7 Mango phone you can.

Curiously, there’s an aspect to using Bing which we have discovered. The speech recognition on our Nokia Lumia 800 W7 Mango phone is superbly accurate.

So in terms of speed, it turns out that it is much faster to use Bing’s speech recognition facility rather than physically type a search into Google.

It’s an interesting situation and it will be interesting to see if Google responds with a Windows Phone 7.5 version of its search app.