bing and what?

[caption id="attachment_432" align="alignright" width="300" caption="look a bird, now I\'m deciding I guess"][/caption]

I keep seeing commercials on TV, I'm sure you have to, where there is one person and another person asks them a question, the commercial then goes something like this:

• Normal Person: Hey want to get lunch


• Freakazoid: Lunch from the latin luncha for eating during the daytime


• Normal Person: Huh?


• Freakazoid: Oklahoma abbreviation OK, OOOOOOklahoma where the wind goes...


• Normal Person: I said "huh?" not "ok?" you stupid fuck

These terrible abortions have been shoved onto the world by Microsoft to promote bing. The idea here is that using Google / Yahoo / etc. causes such a delude of useless results that querying a normal search engine is like talking to the freak from our vignette. The alternative bing is a decision engine and by using that you can "stop searching, start deciding".

First off for full disclosure, I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft, I think they make expensive sub-par software. On the other hand though, I program in .Net and work in XP and Vista everyday, I also own a Mac and have ubuntu installed at home. I use Microsoft products, there are some that I even like, but their corporate culture and quality control bugs me. If you want to write a snarky comment about me being a linux-head or a mac-fanboy or a windoze-m$-hater, feel free to.

The whole "Decision Engine" thing is what pisses in my Corn Flakes, its such nothing market-speak. They synergized outside the box with a shifted paradigm to come up with Decision Engine. Here is the thing though, what the fuck does it mean? Does it mean that it will make decisions for me, is it a big step forward in finding stuff on the internet? So I decided to do a completely scientific comparison of bing and google.

The first step in this was searching the term "ok" as this is the most annoying example from the bing commercial. Here are my completely scientific results.

bing	[caption id="attachment_434" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="bing search of ok"][/caption]
google	[caption id="attachment_435" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="google search of ok"][/caption]

Bing's first result is for Oklahoma! Think about that for a second, and now here it is again because it bears repeating, BING'S FIRST FUCKING RESULT IS THAT OK IS AN ABBREVIATION FOR FUCKING OKLAHOMA! You'd think after the commercial they would have thrown something into their indexing algorithm. Google correctly points me to a wiki article about the term "okay" before suggesting Oklahoma. But let's move past the obvious and focus on the fact that besides bing fulfilling their own prophecy, what about bing helps me decide? Nothing, they are the same page layout, they are the same thing, they do the same fucking thing.

But what is there to decide, maybe this is user error, maybe I should ask it something it could actually answer. I want chinese food for dinner, let's see what happens when I search bing and google for "chinese food near me" (note: I made sure to sign out of each so that neither would have an advantage knowing my location from an account).

bing	[caption id="attachment_438" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="bing search for \"chinese food near me\""][/caption]
google	[caption id="attachment_439" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="google search for \"chinese food near me\""][/caption]

Here Google clearly wins, Bing thinks I want to know about chinese food in Maine (ME) and proceeds to tell me all about it. Google makes the same mistake but then also uses some google magic to determine that I live in Columbus, OH and provides some chinese food that is actually in this state.

I don't want this to turn into a who's better at this query or that query type thing. Let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture, bing doesn't help you decide, it is a search engine. And that's the whole point of this post, fuck your market-speak Microsoft. Don't obfuscate, innovate. If you want to take down Google go spend some of your money to design something that is actually better. Bing as it stands today is a moderately effective search engine with pretty pictures, nothing more.

There is plenty of room to innovate, there are things people could do to help me make decisions, but Bing doesn't do any of this. Search engines could start leveraging social networking information to understand the person that I am and tailor my results, they could allow the end-user to vote results up and down for a query so that the group prunes the result set, they could do some research and development and come up with something that would blow my mind.

The problem with Bing isn't that its not a good search engine, its that its not a good decision engine, its not any kind of decision engine, its a fucking search engine. Microsoft is famous for and probably makes a ton of money off of sprinkling marketing fairy dust on their shitty shitty products, so they won't stop, it just pisses me the fuck off. Stop with your dumb commercials with annoying fucks rambling like idiots because you've completely revolutionized searching and you no longer present results in a big list sorted by your concept of relevance, until you actually revolutionize searching, like Google did with their pagerank algorithm.