Editor’s note: This is part of a series that chronicles an experiment this week by T3’s SVP – “If I stopped Googling cold turkey for a week, what would happen?”

Entering Day 3, I seemed to have stopped my involuntary pattern of clicking straight into Google to start my search, but have to mentally prompt myself to search through Bing. It’s not feeling fluid yet.

The next level of search is closer to the random acts of “getting smart” that are part of our process. This often involves getting a broad sense of what is happening in a particular industry, reviews of competitors, digging into available third-party research and any happy accidents that occur during the search.

From my perspective, this is the part of using search that matters most. Initially, I will search under broad terms to get into the ballpark. (I have a good sense if there is enough “there” there in the first two pages.) I am looking for depth (which comes from credible sources) and perspective (which comes from multiple sources). If an area is content-rich, I will go 7 to 10 pages deep, filling in different pieces of the puzzle.

In searching with Bing, I started by backtracking to see how results compared to earlier searches I had started for a new business prospect using Google. With a quick scan, I could see that key articles, press releases, corporate site info and a few blog posts about this client were the same on both search engines. The order was different and Bing did surface a few things that I had not seen on Google, including a happy accident that yielded a nugget I had been looking for.

Being a guy who clicks (I’m hell on keyboards) rather than someone who hovers or mouses-over icons, it took me a few pages to see that Bing has a subtle graphic prompt to the right of each result. When you mouse over, you get a synopsis of the piece to read before clicking. Hmm…there may be a replacement for my old strategy of scan, guess, click, scan content and then read or back out.

Being curious (and breaking an earlier promise), I did a quick side-by-side of Bing and Google results on the same, very specific query. (I really wanted to test if what I remembered seeing in earlier searches was on par.) While Google yielded 2.5 times more results for this query, I’d consider the quality of what I was looking for to be equal. In these types of searches, the popularity or order of the result on the page really doesn’t come into play for me. I often cast a wide net and have to apply my own critical thinking to find what is most relevant. Depending on the topic, that search can go 7+ pages deep before you can see things deterioriate.

That quick side-by-side also netted an unexpected result. There are design elements in Bing that are growing on me.

My eye is starting to feel more comfortable with text starting indented from the left margin versus Google’s text  which is justified to the far left. Where a Google Results page feels like a typewritten page (functional), Bing has a layer of information design that guides the eye (more editorial).

This may stem from Bing’s use of the left margin in their grid, which adds white space, along with a “Search History” and “Related Searches.” The white space provides some breathing room and helps to frame the content. The “Search History” works as a helpful prompt and keeps that information in my eye-line without being too intrusive. But that section works better when the list is fairly short (less than 10 lines) than when the white space is eaten up by multiple lines.

Google, with all its wonderful white space, now feels austere by comparison. I can sense my eye searching for a starting point on a Google Results page, gravitating to just above center and then working to find the start of the content—up and to the left. “Up and to the left?” Wasn’t that in a Seinfeld episode? I need to search that.