Small Fish, Big Pond

I’m famous!!!

I was looking up the Street Dogs entry in last.fm and keyed the entry into Bing. Front page bottom of the page links to my Last.fm tag directory (which happens to contain Street Dogs).

Although it’s the German version It seems my opinion of punk music is closely related enough to Street Dogs and Last.fm that Bing’s algorithms tie the pages together.

click for larger

I frankly find this hard to believe (I’m awesome but not that awesome) and suspect that Bing must have some tracker cookie influencing their results to make them a bit more customized to the place I goto. But even if THAT is true it’s still amazing that Bing could make such an amazing connection.

Still maybe I am influential enough that I’m front page news for Bing’s search.

Bing just integrated a tool to their maps that polls flickr for geotagged images and overlays them against the streetview images in the same way photosynths overlay each other.

It’s not the most amazing thing but it’s nice to see a massive database like flickr be mined for locally applicable data like this.

In response Google just opened Google Maps Labs with some new features.
Is it just me or does Google Maps Labs have nothing worthwhile by comparison to what Bing released?

Drag a box and zoom is cool but I thought it already had that. I must be thinking of the millions of other map programs that do this normally. It reminds me of when Apple made a big deal adding Cut+Paste to the iPhone. It’s not a new feature, it’s just fixing an omission.

Aerial Imagery is nice when available but Bing has had that all along. Google is playing catch-up here.

Rotatable Maps only make sense on the GPS in my car, and even then it’s a bit disorientating. Besides rotating an image isn’t really “innovative”.

Where in the World game?! I’m going to stop here because this is absurd, when I’m looking for directions the last thing I want to do is get distracted playing a boring game. The only time I play virtual voyeur on Google maps or Google earth I know where i want to go.

It’s like MS and Google have switched places. Bing is testing some features that are new and could lead to alot of cool things. Google is giving us stuff that we’ve always had and expecting us to applause.

Just an addition to my post about Transitioning to Bing, looks like Apple may be following suit on their iPhones.

I won’t go into it too much, it’s shocking that Apple would integrate a Microsoft product into their market dominator bla bla. I just wanted to point out that I’ve seen alot of positive feedback on Bing recently in addition to my own. They’re quickly catching up to Google in terms of product, then it’s just a matter of drawing customers away. It’s hard, firefox still has less market share than IE when it’s an arguable better product.

Still, even if Apple and Microsoft are able to strike a Bing-on-iPhone deal, Apple may have its own search solution up its sleeve. A source for BusinessWeek said that Apple has a “skunk works” to build its own search, and that a deal for Bing is merely “buying itself time.”

The point is that bing isn’t just a failed attempt, it’s a legitimate product worth checking out, enough that Apple will let it sit on the iPhone until they have another alternative to google.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to start trying out Microsoft’s bing search at work as the default search field in firefox. I’m starting to like it, enough that I’m converting over my home computer browsers as well. Apparently they’re getting more market share now and while it’s hard to say if most of that is because MS pushes it as the default in their OS I think some of it must be others like me who see some definite advantages over the almighty google.

I like the look a little bit better, I hate to think that it’s just a little background picture that is making such a big difference but the single column of google against all that whitespace is kind of irritating by comparison. It bugs me because I don’t watch TV much and the one Bing commercial I saw made a big deal out of this. The commercial was stupid but it was right.

Same with their tag line, “Make a *decision* with Bing” or whatever it was. I’m a master of finding what I need on google but it usually takes some time to trackdown useful data; like pouring through raw data to find hidden nuggets of useful info. Bing seems to parse what I need a little bit better without being an epic fail like Wolfram Alpha was. I’m not sure if it’s google’s popularity ranking for searches but they seem to bring a lot of the pointless chaff to the surface, when what I’m looking for is the actual data the chaff is based on (sorry if that is a bit confusing, it’s hard to describe).

The layout is a bit nicer with Bing; having a lefthand column again was cluttered at first but indispensable one I was used to it.

The video section plays an excerpt of the video when you hover over it, that’s a nice feature. It’s low quality preview thumbnails but that means it doesn’t take 20 seconds to download a preview. Type in your favorite band and try it out.

I don’t like the image search section as much as google, but mostly because I’m not used to the way they open the image back in the same window. I have to train myself not to middle click images into new windows, very annoying.

Google maps feature beats Bing hands down. And my two most used sections in Google, iGoogle and Google Reader don’t even exist in Bing.

I always liked google because it was a simple search engine but at the time things like Yahoo’s annoying ultra sponsored search was the comparison. Google is always making their search seem more simple but it’s still actually quite complex, all they change is the looks and frankly making your search engine into a giant whitespace is visually irritating to me. And even with the results all you have is a single column of result, the only other column is sponsored ads. Bing is still simple but a bit more visually appealing and the results seem to fit what you’re looking for a bit better.

Which is ironic because Google just started making their searches more location specific and it seems to have made searches worse in my opinion. Another instance of them over thinking a basic job and making it worse, maybe I’ll write a post on that later.

But for general web search, video, and possibly image search I think Bing actually has the better engine. I think people should give it a try for a couple weeks, they might be pleasantly surprised.

MG Siegler is blowing more into the fact that Microsoft’s Bing search includes Apple Apps.

Not technically a web page, it would seem that Bing is injecting this data right into its results to make sure the user gets what they’re looking for. And that’s great, especially considering that Microsoft, of course, has a rival app store with Windows Marketplace. And their store contains many of the same apps that yield App Store results on Bing, such as Facebook and AIM .

First off I agree with him that it’s smart for Bing to put an emphasis on iPhone apps because the iPhone is so popular that when many people who are searching for “facebook app” are searching for the iPhone facebook app. In fact most people that search for “*blank* app” are looking for iPhone apps. There are a few more smartphone options out there but most people searching for those are smart enough to know that app means apple and will search for “Facebook windows mobile” or “Facebook android”.

However this isn’t some concession where MS is giving in to Apple. If you want a search to be the best you try to give people what they want first. Pushing your sponsored crap over what a person is actually looking for makes for a negative search experience.

Siegler tries to play this off as if Bing is advertising it’s competitor as if this were some fanboy face off. He is completely wrong that the Apple iTunes App store is a competitor with windows Market Place. Apple iPhone apps don’t work on non-apple phones and Windows Mobile apps don’t work on iPhone. The Phones themselves may be in competition with each other but once you got one or the other you don’t have the option of choosing between the two app stores. The stores are not competitors, if somebody already has an iPhone they’re not going to be shopping your store. But you can still cash in by getting some search revenue off them. And imagine if the iTunes App store had an affiliate option like amazon where somebody could get money for referring a sale to them (I know stop laughing. We know that Apple would never thing of letting others in on their action!)

Making a big deal about this is trying to pit MS against Apple where no competition exists making it a non-issue. Although it does make for an interesting social commentary on how people feel the need to create an “Us vs. Them” situation.

On a related note I’ve set my firefox search box to Bing instead of Google to try it out. There was a blog post somewhere where somebody mentioned how Bing was a decent search engine that is automatically looked over since Google is just assumed to be the defacto best. I figured it was worth giving Bing a try to see that if once I’m past the “This is odd and not what I’m comfortable to” phase if it will be a decent search engine.

Additional, Additional: Don’t search for “Bing” with google’s image safe search set to “off”.