Be Excellent To Each Other

MuskyScrote are trying to scrape the clag of MSN search off their fingers with a new search engine, then. If you can withhold the blood laced vomit from your gullet for more than a few seconds into the video on http://www.bing.com , you'll find it's a "decision engine" rather than a search engine.

Fuck off you marketing belching anuses.

What's the point? Really?

It's all very amusing. The BBC article I just read quoted Microsoft as saying the "Google UI hasn't been updated in years". That's because it fucking works, you cunts.

Yeah. It's a box. What I do done type in and press the button. Then it shows the stuff that I searched for.

Well, maybe. I thought the same thing about Altavista until I stumbled across Google when it was still in beta (by noticing the googlebot crawling in my referrer logs). Search isn't necessarily a solved problem, just because Google are All That right now, and I am glad R&D continues on it.

I stopped using Altavista, Metacrawler and Yahoo when I found Google. Which was a box what I do done type in and press the button, then it shows the stuff that I searched for. I don't need all of this cluttered sharp cornered shit flung at my eyeballs. There's a reason why there's no poledancing and strobe lights in libraries.

Not necessarily. Look at that video again. They are trying to combine search engines under one roof that Google can't do. For example, search for flights, and have the search engine UI itself move to one suitable for showing flights -- one where price, departure date, airline, etc are shown side by side in a table. Search for a book, and see a list of vendors and a price from each vendor. Jump from the flight search to a hotel search on the same dates and see hotel reviews. This is a smart idea, I think.

The basic search starts from a single box, but the results UI is customised to the type of search you made. I don't see what's so wrong with that.

MUMBLE GRUMBLE RICHARD! MUMBLE GRUMBLE! I'm cranky and hate everything.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't bet on anything decent coming from Microsoft's horrific design-by-committee management processes, but there's no doubt that they have a hell of a lot of smart people with a hell of a lot of good ideas. And sometimes a decent product beats the odds and escapes (Windows Live Writer, FiddlerTool, Visio (although they bought that mostly as-is I think), the 360 (barring the QA shortcuts resulting in the RRoD problems).

But I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with the ideas in that video, and I don't think that Google's current pre-eminence is a reason to stop trying out new ideas in such a complex area as web search. Hell, don't forget, my past-and-current employer makes an extremely decent living out of being a package/flight/hotel search engine middleman.

*eyes open tearyly*
*small voice* Richard. Tell me the world won't change anymore.

Hell, I hope not. I'm a child of the information era. I love change.

Google are doing this in part. Google for a book, and one section of the results will be pulled in from Google Shopping, with a link taking you to the differently laid out shopping results. Google a place, and one section of the results will be pulled in from Google maps, with a mini version of the map shown on the main screen. I agree this looks like an extension of that concept though.

MS aren't showing anything here that Google aren't already working on/have implemented already.

Not true, the travel stuff is smart (and something I can claim knowledge of as it's my day job).

That's not fair. I'm sure a top group of top marketing execs sat there for top months thinking top names up for it. Then, one of them went "BING! Like, you know! BING!" and the rest started nodding and going "mm mmm mmmMMmmM" "Bbrmmmm BrBBRBRRRRRMMMmm" "BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM BELM" then they got a gravelly voiced fucking PRICK to read SHIT into a fucking microphone.

It's my day job too! And it's nothing out of the ordinary really. It's pretty good, but nothing Google haven't showed us they're capable of. Believe me, Google aren't going to be worrying about this.

I only fly BA.

You are Meaty AICMFP.

Also, Google did work really well and was significantly better than any other search engine when it came out and that is why it was so successful. When the options were ask.com and that one with the dog, which no matter what you typed in gave you the same 20 hits, google was a breathe of fresh air, as it found sites which were not on the to 100 sites list. Now though, not so much. Now it is more about who has payed google* to be at the top and who knows what magic word to put in to get to the top. The advantage of a new search engine is it would be starting from scratch, so would actually search the web, not a preselected group of sites. However, as it is MS, this will not be the case as they will have already sold all searches to the highest bidder.

*may not be the case, but you know what I mean.

Do you work with mrsA as well?

A friend of mine at work mentioned wolfram alpha to me the other day.

That seems quite nice. I do wonder if the alpha in their name is the condition of their release as there are lots of things it doesn't quite get yet.

Malc

I had a fiddle with Wolfram Alpha last night. I don't get what it is for.
Also, it's nice that Bing is going to be better than Google (until Google went and brought out the Touch), but how will it be cheaper?

Nervous Pete, can you shed some light on this please.

Give them time. *Glowers darkly.*

There was a test run, turned out that the stripper's outstretched feet kept knocking the books off the shelves, and it was hard to scan the barcodes in the flashing ultraviolet light. Practical reasons, you know.

And you weren't getting any work done. And the visitors were complaining about books with the pages stuck together. etc.

Me neither. Or, well, it's for helping children cheat at their homework?

Fuck me, it's the pub quiz search engine!

Also, groups of people couldn't hold a decent conversation with all that loud music going on.

It does interesting things if you enter equations. And it had a nice display if you enter two films. Other than that I didn't find anything compelling, but I didn't try hard. Wolfram is a smart bloke and his company is full of smart people, so there must be more to it somewhere.

A workmate called Jen did actually catch someone jerking off in the history section behind a newspaper in Headingley library, in Leeds. We had to chuck him out, obv. He looked like a ginger Jeffrey Archer. Yeurch.

He sounds like a MGS baddie?

Was he buff?

From what I've read, Wolfram Alpha is more of an expert system than a search engine. The search engine moniker has been slapped on it by over-excited PR people and journalists.

Was it a book about the history of badgers by any chance?

I like the idea of Bing, and if it's in any way successful, decent competition for Google et al is never going to be a bad thing.

I'm useless at searching for things online. If I want reviews of things, a lot of the time my Google searches just bring up shops, and while these shops do have the ability to hold reviews, they're very regularly empty.

I can't remember, I went to Pete's happy place immediately after. (In my head. Not the badger section, btw.)

So, Bing is a 'decision engine' that you 'ask questions'. You know, I think Microsoft might have finally stumbled across something that's never really been done before, rather than just ripping off some other company. Oh.

Yeah, but ask was just a search engine, and the fact that you 'asked it questions' meant that the search results were generally just totally wrong.

wasn't there supposed to be coming out another search engine as well , specialised in giving you useful statistics as answers to your questions?

I'm not sure, but it could be quite useful at times (and for pub quizzes).

Also, I apparently live under the sea! How have I not noticed this?
http://www26.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=saltcoats

That would be Wolfram Alpha.

There's also a similar thing to Wolfram that's been around a good while - Start

Wolfram Alpha doesn't know how tall Stephen Wolfram is.

These are all obviously made of fail as they don't have short snappy names. "Wolf in a pram" "start" PAH! BING! see? you hear thaT? BING! It's the sound of advertising people ejaculating. BING! *nod nod nod* BING BING BING *nodnodnodnodnodnod* yes! BING! Hey, it would be more awesome even more if they'd put an R at the end. BINGr! Yeah! I just BINGred a hit through cyber webinnnerneh.

New skins available

It's the dotcom boom all over again! Yay!

HELLOOOO BINGALING!