Microsoft Bing
So today, Microsoft unleashed its new search engine, Bing. Apparently it was gonna be called “Kumo” before that (which I liked more). Live.com just redirects to Bing now. First thought: Thanks for wasting the four letter URL namespace, Microsoft!
Second thought: Bing.com basically looks like a re-named Live Search. People were talking about the mouse-over video search results starting automagically. I thought I saw that feature at the Microsoft booth at SXSW a few months ago. While I’m not totally familiar with the original features of Live Search, it really seems like this is just an incremental update, if not just a renaming.
Giving the search engine a fair chance, I guess it’s okay. The search results for my name are good! First one is my blog and the second one is my portfolio. Microsoft also recognizes my Facebook profile as the real Hung Truong instead of that other car Hung Truong that Google links to. Another thing that’s kind of nice is that Bing actually links to the website directly in the search results. Try right click copying a search result link in Google and you get something like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hung-truong.com%2F&ei=1ZMkSv3gDonUNNfQvYYF&rct=j&q=hung+truong&usg=AFQjCNGifmoNxXdlqaiytpE2QMgHxLkl6A&sig2=Uj7WesESTLWJEXHkfqK2Fw
The same thing in Bing is just:
http://hung-truong.com/
One more funny thing is that Bing is soooooo biased towards Microsoft, and you can tell already. Type the letter ‘w’ into Bing and the 7th auto-suggestion is “Windows Vista.” Google comes up with nothing MS related. The now famous example is that if you type “linux” you’ll get
- linux windows
- linux microsoft
- linux vista
WTF!? Despite the wonkiness, I hope Bing does well. Because someone’s gotta kick Google’s ass for the sake of competition. While I’d rather see it from an independent player, someone’s really gotta step up search and make it better. Actually, Yahoo is doing some neat stuff with semantic web thingies. Maybe MS and Yahoo can double-team Google or something.