Everyone’s favourite technology company Microsoft are making a big attempt to break Google’s monopoly on searching the web. Odd for Microsoft to be fighting against a monopoly you might think, but they’re desperate to claw back some market share. They were slow off the mark where the Internet is concerned and they’ve never really caught up. Their new search engine is called Bing, nothing to do with Bing Crosby I don’t think. Apparently it stands for “Bing Is Not Google”. I wonder if they took the recursive acronym idea from GNU, I hope they didn’t violate the GPL if they did 🙂
Anyway, my reason for rambling on about this is as an excuse to show you an image I found hilarious. It’s a comparison of searching the term Linux on Google and Bing. The suggestions are a little different. I mean “linux vista” come on? You could try and hide it a little better than that. Nobody is going to trust a search engine with a hidden agenda… but then who’s to say Google don’t have a hidden agenda either I suppose. Got my tin foil conspiracy hat at the ready. I’m not crazy about Google’s monopoly on the web and we’ve talked about it on Linux Outlaws a few times, but they do help Open Source projects and there’s no way I’d prefer Microsoft, sorry Bill.
This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. I got it from Andrew Mason’s Flickr page and I was originally tipped off about it by my friend Edythemighty in the Linux Outlaws IRC channel.
Hehe… Ballmer is at it again, eh? They just can’t keep from doing it. I mean Bing? Come on! What kind of a shite name is that? I was immediately thinking of Silvio’s club there too. 😀
BTW, Stefano wrote about this as well: http://www.stefanoforenza.com/the-decision-engine
@Fab – Ah we both posted on the same day as well, I didn’t realise. I don’t keep up with my feeds fast enough as you know. Great minds think alike I suppose
So I got a look at the ‘developer’ version of the site, and it’s much different. Note, I’m not a microsofty, in fact, I’m a huge linux user/fan/etc. The presentation that they have for things like flight information, image searches, product reviews, etc, were done *very* well. The search results are comparable to Google (or at least as good as live.com was), and for a thin demographic of users and types of searches, I can see it being a valuable tool. I did a quick write up at http://ufies.org/archives/004221.html
Of course, in true MS fashion they fubared up the release and instead of giving everyone the cool search results presentation, they give us what looks and basically is a re-skin of live.com, which means people look at it, and dismiss it.
@Dan: right.
BTW, talking about feeds, why don’t you opt for full feeds ?
@Stefano – I changed the feed a little while ago because some people weren’t happy about the size of it. I embed a lot of large image files into my reviews and often they’re over 3000 words. Some folks weren’t too happy that they took a long time to load and were bloated. Even cutting down the number of entries to 5 didn’t help a lot because 2 of those 5 could still be massive. I figured the best solution was to put summaries in the feed, those who are interested can click through and others aren’t bothered by the size. That’s the long winded explanation, hope it makes sense 🙂
That’s the thing that was supposed to be called “kumo” right? I thought that was an April Fool’s joke. Looks like a terrific waste of time and money so I am all for it 🙂
Wonder if they’ll have torrent links in their search results. To fully functional, free and legal copies of Windows Professional Ultra Ultimate Plus Edition images 😀
I reckon ms lost the search war when to google became a verb. 🙂
Zune, Bing etc. Ms should have targeted all the layoffs at the marketing debt. It could obviously need some cleansing :p
On a completely different matter, could you please have the full posts in the rss-feed?
I <3 my tiny tiny rss 😀
@kristoffer – Thanks for reading. I tried to explain the situation with the feed, it put me in a difficult position with some people not liking full posts and others wanting them. Perhaps I should arrange some kind of vote, I’ll get thinking on it. I appreciate the input
@Dan: pft! you’re using feedburner.. just burn another feed ;-).
@Stefano – That’s a good idea actually, I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll see what I can do 🙂
Is it just me, or does it look quite a bit like a GDM login screen?
@mjjzf – It does quite a bit yes 😀
It is designed to carefully integrate a ‘gdm-login’ appearance with a ‘BSOD’ background.
Trouble is now, they won’t know if they’re coming or going 😮
@ben – Hehe good one 🙂