Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I was reading a piece of news regarding search engines.

---------------------------
Microsoft Corp. has finally roped Yahoo Inc. into an Internet search
partnership, capping a convoluted pursuit that dragged on for years
and setting the stage for them to make a joint assault against the
dominance of Google Inc.

    [...]

Now the extended reach Microsoft is gaining will let it introduce its
recently upgraded search engine, called Bing, to more people. The
Redmond, Wash.-based software maker believes Bing is just as good, if
not better, than Google's search engine. Taking over search
responsibilities on Yahoo's popular site gives Microsoft a better
chance to convert Web surfers who had been using Google by force of
habit.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jfYhOMMWKBgelmWuTgZp2f-LQLGgD9
9O7QHO1
or
http://tinyurl.com/mjb9qu
--------------------------

"Bing is just as good, if not better, than Google's search engine."

In this quoted sentence, at the moment of reading, I was expecting to
see the second collocated "as." In addition, I find the position of
the second comma odd; it would be also odd if I moved the second comma
to the position after "than."

These are my proposed rewrites:
1) Bing is just as good, if not better than, as Google's search
engine.
2) Bing is just as good as, if not better than, Google's search
engine.

Am I right?

Or is such a change unnecessary?
I googled "as good if not better than," and scanned the snippets; the
second collocated "as" strangely went missing in a great number of
snippets.

Please shed some light.

Sincerely,
Tacia