By that measure, you earn about $2.7 a month, and that is sufficient for you to use Bing over Google!?

Again, the vast majority of the time, the Bing results are fine. I think I waste maybe 10 seconds a day re-searching things. ~$0.10 for ~10 seconds (approx $360/hour) is more than my job pays.

How do you factor in the cost to your reputation when people see you using Bing?

I assumed HN community was beyond fashion and opinions like this.

It was meant as a joke, but your reply is interesting. Why would you assume that the HN community is "beyond fashion" and particular opinions? We're human beings. We have flaws and biases that lead us to make irrational decisions. Some of the things that HN users do are hugely driven by fashion (in the sense of following ideas before they're proven) rather than empirical evidence - entrepreneurship has fads (lean startup, startup canvas, social businesses, moonshots, etc), software development flits from one methodology to another (agile dev, functional dev, etc). They're fashions that are trying to improve things rather than merely looking different, but that doesn't mean they're not fashionable.

I know it was a joke, but there actually is something to it.

I started using Bing for the rewards program. I would probably use it even without the rewards program, now. The results are approximately as good as Google - when I can't find something and I go to Google, 95% of the time Google isn't giving me good results either. There are some nice little features and I like the look and layout, but fundamentally what really sold it was the rewards program, which I've been turning into Amazon gift cards and using to fill my bookshelves.

But every time someone sees me use Bing, or I mention that I use Bing, there's very often some judgement there. Like it or not, people, even people on HN, judge you by the tools you use. The social aspect matters: Google and Apple produce excellent technical products, but they're so popular in part because of social effects. No surprise; humans are fundamentally social animals, none of us are beyond fashion.

I assume it was a joke. There are definitely things though, that would sully your reputation in any community; for example, using Comic Sans.

$2.7 > $0 so...

How much is your time worth? If you have to put extra effort into finding what you want, that could very quickly cancel out.

> Shameful admission: Bing is my primary search engine, since they pay me (approx $50 over the past 18 months). 90+% of the time the search results are as good as Google, and re-searching when it isnt takes a few seconds.

IMO, $50/18mo. isn't worth taking a quality hit on anywhere near 10% (or even 1%) of my searches.