After years of trying to be yet another user/consumer search portal, I think Bing is finally coming into its own. While google makes the consumer experience really nice with all their verticalized products and portals, they make it extremely difficult for developers.  Maps, alerts, SDKs, news items, etc are all tightly capped, RSS restricted, and basically difficult to integrate any product with. 

Enter Bing.  Search API, OC control, synonyms, and now even entity extraction.  If they'd just end up doing a clean-Web ad-stripping and core content extraction, their SDKs would be complete.  Bing still has API/SDK "high volume" restrictions, but they are no where as brutal or abrubt in terms of developer rigidity nor pricing.  Google has similar feature-for-feature capabilities, but they don't always expose them in as friendly a way to anyone other than the consumer/end user.

Having just completed a Bing and a Google integration with a Big Data product using both services, I have to say Bing wins hands down for developers in a side by side comparison. 

Agreed. We use Bing in our "search for images" button because it's a lot better than Google.