Member-only story
Why I use Bing, not Google.
This is a simple story of how failing your customer just one time can permanently change their behavior.
I remember it well. It was the summer of 2012. I was working as a software engineer at a company involved in internet advertising. As I often did I had to do a search for something. I fired up Chrome and typed my search into the address bar as I had done thousands of times before.
Nothing happened. Hmm, I thought strange but just a hiccup. I clicked the button to take me directly to Google. Google loaded and I typed my query in the search box. As expected my search page started to load. And then it got stuck. It didn’t load. It looked like it was trying to load but only parts of the results were there.
Well, this was odd and a bit of a pickle normally in a situation like this, the first thing I would do is use Google to find out what might be the problem. Well, it seemed that maybe I had a problem with my browser so I fired up Firefox. I went to Google in Firefox and it loaded fine. I queried something like “Google not loading search results, Chrome”
The results I got back mentioned something about QUIC. After a bit of research, I found out that this was a UDP-based protocol that Google was rolling out intended to speed up web pages. It did however require both the server and the client to support it. Turns out that…
