Microsoft isn't patent troll. They do actual research and spend billions a year on Microsoft Research. No one else in the industry has such an good R&D department. Patent trolls don't do research, they just bully companies. Microsoft is within all their rights to ask for payments on their patents, because they actually do lots of research.

Why would it be extortion or why would there be bribes involved? Microsoft owns the patents based on years of R&D (Microsoft Research is the largest R&D center on the industry) and they legally ask for companies to pay to use their patented technology.

Considering that people search for Bing on Google , yes, people do choose to use Bing. It's not a small number - there's close 10 million searches per month for Bing related queries on Google alone.

You can check search query data here. Remember to change to [exact] search on match types so that it shows real search amount for specific queries.

[bing] 7,480,000
[bing maps] 1,000,000
[bing.com] 450,000
[bing translator] 201,000
[www.bing.com] 135,000
[bing games] 135,000
[bing travel] 110,000
[bing images] 90,500
[bing map] 74,000
[bing search] 60,500
[bing video] 27,100
[www.bing] 27,100
[live search] 22,200
[bing videos] 18,100
[bing toolbar] 12,100
[bing rewards] 12,100
etc....

As opposed to Google being default search provider in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and tons of other browsers?

I looked at exact match data (ie. [bing] ), not broad. There really is 7.5 million searches for "bing". If you look at broad search (so that it includes things like Bing Crosby), then there's 16.6 million searches.

Other bing related searches:
[bing maps] 1,000,000
[bing.com] 450,000
[bing translator] 201,000
[www.bing.com] 135,000
[bing games] 135,000
[bing travel] 110,000
[bing images] 90,500
[bing map] 74,000
[bing search] 60,500
[bing video] 27,100
[www.bing] 27,100
[live search] 22,200
[bing videos] 18,100
[bing toolbar] 12,100
[bing rewards] 12,100
etc....

And these are search requests per month, with these exact terms, on Google. People are obviously searching for and wanting to use Bing.

Windows 98 box?

Why are you calling me a moron when answering an AC? Besides, Microsoft hardly did anything evil. Both Apple and Google are being much more evil now a days. Gee, your OS comes with a browser so you don't need to ftp to some address you don't even know to get a browser. Outrageous!

So in reality, it isn't Windows problem, it's user problem. Unless you run walled garden like iOS on your PC, there will always be malware that will try to trick user, regardless of OS. It works in Windows, it works in OSX and it works in Linux.

I don't have any problems, and I do check my network traffic from time to time with Wireshark just because legit programs send awful amount of all kinds of data to internet too.

There are perfectly good free antivirus programs now, if you want to run one. Most of them are actually better than the non-free antivirus programs. Microsoft Security Essentials is a free antivirus that is many times better than Symantec's and others. On top of that it is lightweight and fast, compared to the bloated crap that Norton is. It works on slower machines too, detects more viruses and doesn't break stuff.

So choose from those. Personally I don't run any antivirus as I don't download random executables from the internet nor surf to random porn sites or download from torrent sites. Windows is also secure now a days, and I haven't had a single malware in like 10 years.

Wow, so just because you only now realized that they use MS technology their search engine is suddenly worse? Talk about hating just for the purpose of hating.

And you get mention of Bing when you search something and scroll down. There's this:

results by Bing

built with Yahoo

What does this mean?

How much would you like to put? There is also 7,5 million monthly searches in Google for 'bing'.

Google is changing that though, as they're been heavily pushing Chrome with software installs, OEM's and ISPs. So instead of Yahoo toolbar or Bonzi Buddy, you now get Chrome when you install some software. How delightful.

Yeah, that's not paranoid at all. There's a much higher change that users would change to Google instead of Bing, and since Microsoft gets paid for the Yahoo deal, why would they deliberately shoot themselves in to leg?

At this point there won't be anyone else than can compete with Google either. Now a days search engines rely heavily on datamining and especially keyword data supplied by users when searching. It's also the reason why Google datamines so much. With their market share they get significantly more data than Bing, especially long tail keywords and keywords people search less often.

Google also relies on looking which result users choose and if they return back from that site. If user chooses a particular search, it means the user thinks it's relevant and could be good. But if he quickly returns back from the site, it means he didn't find the information he was looking for from that results. That is also data that Google gets much more just because they have so much more users.

So all in all, if it wasn't for Microsoft, we would only have Google. No one else can compete with them at this point. Interestingly, Google is failing in Russia, China and South Korea where local companies got the market share before Google, and they can't really do much about it. Google tried to play dirty tricks in Russia by disabling the initial search engine choice dialog and defaulting to Google instead of Yandex, but they were quickly called of it and had to stop that practice.