I am old enough to remember sitting in the meeting (late 1990s) when an IT consultant told agency staff about this wonderful technology called a search engine that made it easy to find things on the Internet. I’m pretty sure Netscape Navigator was mentioned along with Alta Vista, but the name everyone scribbled down was Google (more because of the fun name than it being described as cool and new).

A habit was formed.

I’ve always loved research and grew up digging through card catalogs, stacks and hitting up the agency’s librarians (yes, librarians—two of them) for back issues of trade and business magazines. For an info junkie like me, the Internet and Google were amazing.

In those sweet early days of search, I remember feeling as if I was supporting the little guy when I used Google. I grew to appreciate that clean white page, the cleverly shifting logo and the open-ended box that would fulfill my insatiable need to know. I also loved the white space challenge it threw down to craft a crisp set of words to find the exact factoids.

I got hooked on Google and got hooked hard—10+ years of hard searching. Whether my query was precise or fat, Google gave me my starting point. I grew comfy with how it worked, what to expect, and how to improve my search skills. My Google habit was so ingrained, that I rarely looked at other search engines. I was moving too fast to learn another way and not innately curious enough to try.

So along comes Bing and some self reflection about my Google habit and patterned behavior.

If I stopped Googling cold turkey for a week, what would happen? Could I adjust? How often would I fall off the wagon? (Once, so far. My brain went on autopilot to Google to fact-check the correct name of the Reader’s Guide to Periodic Literature. Found the same result on Bing a minute later.) Would I find new, more, better?

Over the next week, my focus is going to be more about behavior, familiarity and expectations than a side-by-side, feature-by-feature comparison. My Home page will remain set on MSN (as it’s been for years.) Google will keep its place in my Favorites. The challenge is to break my own habits and take a look at a search engine with fresh eyes for the first time in 10 years.

Some caveats: MSN is a T3 client, so I have an interest in their new products. Any research I’ve done on Bing is the same anyone can find through business magazines and visiting the Bing site. MSN is my default Home page because I like it. My observations will be straight up, whether it makes our MSN account team squirm or not.