So Microsoft has launched a new search engine—Bing.com, “the world’s first decision engine!”—and is hyping the launch with a series of commercials presenting Bing as the solution to the frantic info overload of other search engines. Here’s one:
It’s a good series of ads, miles above those million-dollar duds with Seinfeld, but still: Is using Google really like being trapped in bed—or on the street, or in a yoga class—with Rain Man?
In my experience, Google has always been pretty straightforward, plus I don’t know how I feel about Microsoft making “decisions” about my search results. (These are the people who thought that Seinfeld ad was a good idea.) Is the keyword-ignited “info overload” the Bing ads are referencing perhaps the Google sidebars of search-term-related ads? (Which are weird but unimposing.) Or is Bing just trying to align Google with internet chaos the same way Mac ads align PCs with nerdy blandness?
Who knows, so I tried a test, entering the search terms “brides falling down” into both Google and Bing. Both quickly found what I wanted, but Google did it with some randomy bank shots, while Bing did it with 100 percent more advertising.
perhaps as a tech “guru” type guy, you could try more than one test; maybe something non-hipstery. Or, you could just reflexively hate on anything MS puts out without actually putting any, you know, effort into finding out more about it. Take a peek at the travel tool, for instance.
@ 1, MS’s track record makes “reflexively hating anything they put out” an entirely reasonable reaction.
What is it with Microsoft? They ditch their old branding because it had gotten too convoluted: “MSN? MSN Search…. no, it’s Live Search. No, it’s just Live. No, it’s MSN Live Search.” They start afresh with a simple word, Bing. But it seems some faction withing Microsoft is pushing “Decision Engine” instead, and we begin all over again.
I tried bing for a week duplicating every search i made with google … and google always returned more relevant results than bing …
I really love that they are spending over 100 million on ads while laying off employees
the real problem is that bing is trying to buy “coolness” … which is something that is earned not bought … regardless of the fact that google doesn’t claim to be hip, just efficient
@3 – I believe it’s the Puff Daddy P Diddy Pop-a-diddy-puff-puff syndrome.
First, as switzer @1 said, your entire methodology reeks with the obscene odor of hipster bullshit and lacks any kind of rational analysis. Second, You Tube and Google have a relationship, and so of course the You Tube clip surfaces higher in their results. And while I’m glad that you managed to avoid the advertisement that way, you do realize that You Tube is making no money because they have no ads? And that they can’t afford to make their site better, which is why You Tube has become a wasteland of brain-dead parodies and copies of popular videos with no good filtering tools?
You also didn’t bother to make use of Bing’s cool video results page, which might have made sense since you were looking for, you know, a video. If you had, you would see that the video will surface on the actual page, and will play just with you just cursing over it with no ads or anything.
Your internet savvy is at the level of a retarded monkey, but it’s OK…you may not have actually posted something of value, or indicative of thought, but you did keep your coolness credentials. Congratulations! Now go back to your true callings in life: narrating Showgirls and writing up Last Days (both of which I love).
1 and 6: I’m responding to the ads, not offering a detailed analysis of the product. And the ads are most definitely aimed at retarded monkeys like me.
@ 6, did you work of developing Bing? You’re post reeks of the defensiveness of someone with a vested interest in Bing’s success.
Duh, should read “work on” not “work of” in my first sentence at 8.
I absolutely despise these bing ads. I refuse to use it because of them. I don’t mind if you make a new wheel, but don’t try to sell me on it by claiming that the old wheel doesn’t work. The history of the internet is divided into Before Google and After Google.
If you really want me to use your search engine, let me search for special characters. I cannot believe what a pain in the ass it is trying to find out how to escape a % in a batch script.
@6 ack! too many words!
This is why they bullied you.
@6,
I’m going to support what Schmader said. Anything any web developer puts together has to keep the retarded monkeys in mind otherwise it’s worthless. Even very web savvy people can be flummoxed by the shit many developers fob off on us.
@6. As President of the Differently-Abled Monkey Coalition, I am offended by your derogatory use of the word retarded. I say good day to you, sir.
I wish this moronic bing thing respected the robots.txt file that we established as the Do Not Crawl sign back when we created the Internet to watch the coke machines and coffee pots for us while we were in the lab.
But no, they’re MSFT, so they ignore the posted rules on the Information Superhighway.
Dicks.
The example they give in the ad — tickets to Hawaii — is extraordinarily stupid. EXTRAORDINARILY. Because finding tickets to Hawaii is easier than falling off a log no matter what search engine you use. Yes, if you just type Hawaii or tickets in, you’ll get bad results, but if you type Hawaii tickets you’ll tap instantly into the thousands of people desperately trying to sell you some. Google is particularly set up to give you excellent results, because of their sales-promoting, hit-sensitive algorithms.
Where search engines fail is on subjects where no one is trying to sell you anything. Wikipedia has taken up a lot of slack here, but there are still vast voids, greater than the oceans, in the representation of knowledge.
And the biggest black hole of all is when you’re trying to find information about something that IS a salable commodity, but you’re looking to learn, not to buy. For instance, trying to find usable information on musical artists can often bury you in a landslide of identical promotional text from some CD release, repeated endlessly on a thousand CD vendors, only a tiny fraction of which actually have any CDs; everybody’s got the database, even if the business evaporated years ago.
You see this on news searches, too, where the first 100,000 hits are all the same goddamn AP feed, but you have to scan them all because of the one or two alternate viewpoints buried within.
If Bing could address the REAL problems with search, they’d have something. They can’t, though. MS has no imagination, and they’re STILL just chasing Google’s tail, with no real understanding of the way forward. They understand Google’s business model circa 2000 quite well by now, though.
But search is still entirely in the hands of the salesmen, so it’s unlikely to ever get better.
I do like MS’s “Bird’s Eye” map view, though. It genuinely adds something to Google Street View. It’s not new to Bing, though.
@13 – I salute you – or would if my hands reached up that high.
Fnarf said:
Copying the success of true innovators has been a MS hallmark for decades, but it worked while the market for first time PC owners/users was still growing. Not knowing the way forward (which cost them their lead in the browser market, for example) didn’t matter then. But their seeming inability to innovate anything is going to be their downfall.
very true Matt.
I do have a peripheral vested interest in Bing, I admit, though I had no hand in building it. And it’s possible (OK, probable) that I overreacted just a tad. Sorry, David. And yes Blank, I’m long-winded, and yes the bullies beat me severely.
The root of my anger though wasn’t about Bing, it was about the reflexive attitude in the posts and comments. I remember when the Xbox came out (and the Zune) I saw a lot of the same shit. The obvious bias annoys me. I grow weary of watching everything Microsoft does get crapped on, even though many things like Bing (and Xbox, and Zune, and a hundred other products) are totally divorced from the oft-cited sins of its software business.
And aren’t you sick of Google, who, by the way, dropped the innovation ball some time ago when it comes to search? Bing isn’t perfect, but it does some things well, and people who like the internet should welcome the competition anyway.
i’m not going to comment on what’s better, but if you think that google isn’t “controlling” your results, your only fooling yourself…
@17, that’s not strictly speaking true; the original PC was an innovation, and while IBM did most of the work, IBM (not unlike MS today) didn’t understand what they were doing or why. MS had the vision to make it go.
Similarly with their office suite, they didn’t invent any of the components (word processing, spreadsheets, simple databases), but they understood brilliantly how to integrate them into a usable product. They earned their market share there, while people like WordPerfect and Lotus lost theirs through laurel-resting, and not knowing how to move forward. Same with networking; MS NT domains blew Novell out of the water.
But since then, they’ve been coasting on their established lead, just waiting for someone to take it away from them. The internet took them by surprise, as did email. It took them YEARS to make Outlook into a usable product, and the very fact that Windows still comes with (unremoveable) Outlook Express on it, more or less disabling the PCs of any inexperienced user who is foolish enough to click on a mailto link, is inexcusable.
And the internet is where it’s happening; in five or ten years, there may not BE any PCs. No one has cracked it yet, but they’re getting close; Google docs is pretty crappy still, but it has features (like infinite undo) that will eventually make workstation-based software obsolete. And then it won’t matter if you have one of those cute li’l Macs or not. Almost every app that matters, like big-time SQL jobbies, can get an internet front end these days; and even things like movies and music make more sense to store on the web and stream than to carry around on private disk space, just waiting to crash or get infected.
@19, you’re right, Google is also in the position of losing their edge. Fat and happy = no more innovation, I guess; their ad business means they stay rich even if they start to coast, and they’re definitely coasting, or maybe rather casting around. They might catch something, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else gets there first.
And it’s sure as hell not going to be Twitter or Facebook, neither of whom appear to know how to scale up their rather shaky operations.
@19 You say “totally divorced from”, I say “totally funded by the monopolistic business practices of”. I think it’s not a subtle distinction.
@22 Did you see the Google Wave demo? Have you used Google Maps? See, I don’t mind a business that uses the proceeds of one business venture (advertising) to fun other business ventures (maps and mail and other stuff). I do have an issue with Microsoft leveraging their monopoly, and their lock on their file formats, to stifle innovation.
Google may not be innovating as quickly as it once did, but it fosters a culture of innovation which is (IMO) a Good Thing. I think their practice of asking their engineers to spend 20% of their time working on their own ideas is pretty cool. Sure, Google might have some rights to those ideas you develop on their dime (I’m not sure what those rules look like), but if you come up with something cool you’re liable to get to lead the team to develop it, and you’ll be well paid to do so.
On the other hand, Microsoft seems to take stupendously intelligent individuals, and makes their output completely useless.
I liked the Gates/Seinfeld ads. Am I the only one?