When I started my week with Bing, my goal was to be more conscious of my own behavior in using search engines.

Perhaps my biggest discovery is how much search has become a complete extension of my thought process. A thought fires in my brain and my fingers fly to check a fact, confirm a source, follow a whim or research a topic in a more disciplined way. The benefits of search are so massive, that the tools used to search have become almost invisible. Search is intellectual oxygen. Its fundamental nature has put Google in a unique position, not dissimilar to Xerox, Kleenex and Post-It Notes back in the day—brands that have become shorthand for specific product categories (to the horror of corporate legal departments). For many, search is “Googling it”—without second thought.

The greatest challenge in this was working to compartmentalize the professional and consumer side of my brain. I can’t look at Google or Bing without my marketing instincts kicking in, along with the understanding of the massive stakes in users, revenue, advertising, targeting and analytics that are in play.

Google has earned its position by making search better, easier and faster—to the point that other avenues are bypassed. Searching through Google can be almost an involuntary response. (It was for me.) Asking people to break their patterns and get comfortable with a different way to search will be a challenge.

With Bing, I forced myself up what proved to be a quick learning curve. It’s weird, but even starting the search from a bar embedded in a scenic photo was disorienting at first. (I did miss the whimsy of the shifting Google logo on the homepage.) But once I started the search process, I began to appreciate Bing’s use of color and subtle, but important, adjustments to its grid (especially cues in the left margin). In a few days, Bing felt natural. It also felt intuitive—lightly anticipating what could be next logical steps in my search path. These design nuances compelled me to do a more detailed side-by-side and I was surprised by Google’s austerity.

For me, Bing started fulfilling its “decision engine” promise when I was in a consumer mode—searching for a new car and planning a trip. The primary search results felt equal to what I would have found on Google. However, Bing offered some extras in their “Related Links” section that helped out in my search process. I find myself referencing this area more and more in subsequent searches.

In a business mode, Google offered more results in raw numbers—sometimes by staggering amounts. But during an active search for a new business prospect, I uncovered equal information on both sites even after going six and seven pages deep. In this respect, Bing is another tool to add to your search arsenal. It’s also a reminder to everyone doing research (my daughters in college and high school: take note) that depth and diversity are crucial—it’s not always about speed.

I went off Google cold turkey for a week. I broke a 10-year-old habit. I survived.

Did I find a miracle cure for search? No. But I did find an intuitive addition to my search process. So when my spontaneous brain needs something now (e.g. petit pois on Saturday) or my disciplined research brain needs a deeper dive, I have another open-ended box to start the search.

When I first read about Bing, my marketing brain locked onto its positioning as a “decision engine” rather than a new search engine. This seems like an intriguing way to reframe people’s thinking about “search.” But is that my ad geek view or will it resonate with people?

Last weekend, in a late showing of Julie & Julia, a long-form Bing commercial ran before the movie. The audience giggled in recognition of depicting the overwhelming randomness of search. (MSN agency team: Biggest laugh line came from the female airport security guard cawing like a Bird of Paradise. Points from me for the riff on Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise.”) Point being: people seem intrigued.

Today, I shifted back into consumer mode to test drive the “decision engine” aspects of Bing.

Test subject: Vacation planning. It’s something I loathe and something travelers find increasingly frustrating, according to a widely reported  Forrester study released August 4.

Destination: Santa Fe, New Mexico. It’s a favorite spot for my wife and me (e-mail if you want restaurant recommendations), so I’ll have a decent sense of whether I will be getting good information to help me decide.

First search is for “Santa Fe, New Mexico vacations.” I am greeted by the expected sponsored links, mostly hotel chains and travel Web sites. (I tend to skip sponsored links unless I am looking for something very specific.)

Below that is a “Listings for vacations near Santa Fe, New Mexico” (Google calls this “Local business results for…”) with a map and links to what looked like vacation rentals. If I were a first-timer, there’d be no context for this section, so I’d skip it. Looking down the page, I saw links to the usual suspects—the convention and visitors bureau, and sites that aggregate area hotels.

I glanced at Bing’s “Related Links” section and saw paths to search Santa Fe tourism, hotels and restaurants. (One change to my search behavior is using this section as a second source, instead of just going deeper and deeper in search pages.) Clicking on “Tourism” actually put me in a better place to keep going and sparked an interest in a side trip to Taos. Other than this, other search engines yield similar results.

Next step: airfares. This is a Bing feature I have read about. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see a direct link to Bing’s Travel section from my page of vacation searches, so I backed out to their Home page and clicked into Travel, which feels familiar in an Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz kind of way. The benefit is that I did this within the Bingosphere, instead of opening another site.

I searched for nonstops between Austin and Albuquerque. The tool was easy and quick. The result was eight airlines (with price ranges) and lots of featured options for American Airlines with the lowest rates. For Southwest, there was an “Info” prompt instead of a fare. I know this is a quirk of Southwest’s. So I clicked and was transferred to Southwest’s site, where I had to re-enter my cities and dates. But the extra steps rewarded me with a savings of $100 per ticket with their “Wanna Get Away?” fares.

Big picture: How did Bing help me decide? At a broad level the content is there, but it is still incumbent on the user to sort through city, hotel, restaurant, review, event and other sites to find what he or she wants. The Bing Travel tool is a helpful, fast-access dashboard to fill in part of the answer of “How much is this going to cost me?” The “Related Links” section is a nice short cut or a prompt to other logical parts of the search.

Personally, I’d love to see a Reviews link in Related Links from both journalist and consumer sources. With travel, I am often looking for some credible “local knowledge”, so a gem like the Santa Fe Reporter’s restaurant guide is easier to find.

I’ll sum up my week with Bing on Monday.

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.