Jimmy

I have a problem. It has to do with Microsoft’s ads for Bing, the rebranding/relaunch of Microsoft Live Search. This problem might just be bigger than my problem with the Laptop Hunter ads, which is saying quite a lot.

One of the Bing ads:

Here’s my issue: Bing is being billed as a “decision engine” and that it will reduce “search overload” (see video above), but I’m just not seeing it. I’ve done a few side-by-side searches on Bing and Google and I really see no difference between the results (doing a search for “huntington, in weather” turns up a weather forecast and current conditions from both search engines, but the current temperature is a degree higher from Bing, with Google’s closer to what my home weather station is reporting. (In Bing’s favor, it does return Huntington, Indiana as the first result, whereas Google returns Huntington Beach, California as the first result with my correct Indiana city as second)). I assume Bing is trying to cash in on the recent media about Wolfram|Alpha (the only “computational engine” currently in the Internet) with the “decision engine” definition, but in my opinion it just serves to confuse as the software doesn’t seem to “decide” any more than Google or Yahoo what the information that you’re looking for is, and to even imply that it’s relatively easy to build a “decision engine” (which I can only assume is a cross between a search engine like Google/Yahoo and a computational engine like Wolfram|Alpha) cheapens the concept and insults pretty much everyone in the field of Information Technology, whether they’re working on developing such technology or not.

And then there’s my even bigger beef: “search overload.” What the hell is that? The only way to get search overload is if you get the wrong information than what you were searching for, and no amount of software is going to change the fact that if you do a bad search, you don’t get the information you wanted and, I suppose, it could lead to information overload, but it’s really up to the end user to become a smart searcher and not try to rely on the computer to read their mind. Look, the user knows what the user is looking for, right? The computer is dumb. It’s dumber than dumb. It’s a freaking idiot. It does what it’s told. Google, Wolfram|Alpha, Yahoo and all the other engines on the web have a lot of programming going into them to try to return the results that are most likely to be what the user wants. But it’s still based on probability because the computer can’t read the users mind. It can’t. Maybe in the far future when we’re all dead computers will be able to read the user’s mind, but for now it’s not possible. So instead of trying to pretend the computer can do something it can’t (“decide”? A computer doesn’t decide, it does what it’s told. It gets a search query, it does what the search software tells it to do. There’s no room for deciding, because it’s a set software program. If search is “A” then do “B”. It’s all very logical and metal and binary. Deciding is an emotional process, obviously there’s logic involved as well, but it requires thought and prior knowledge and all the things that make human brains different from every other “brain” (animal or machine) on earth. Simply put, the search software can include a near infinite number of if statements and it will never really be “deciding” anything, it will simply be following the set software routine and it will return the same results to the user no matter if they wanted to know about the cloud type, the band, the movie or the tool when they typed in “anvil” and hit “Search”.

So instead of making “decision engines” we need to teach users better searching habits. I don’t care if the user wants to use Google, Bing, Yahoo, Woflram|Alpha or anything else. It’s nobodies business what engine the user uses, because if we all became a little less lazy and a little more savvy about how we search, the world would be a better place, because we could finally take these annoying “search overload” ads and shove them in a dark closet in Redmond.

And one last thing: Google doesn’t shove as much information at me as Bing does: Google has no annoying (albeit pretty) picture with hover boxes on the main search page and it pushes the “related searches” information to the bottom of the page, not right up top on the side. Little nitpicks, I know, but that extra clutter right at the beginning of my search experience just further justifies my “your ’search overload’ assertion thing is crap” argument.

Maybe if I tried Bing some more I’d like it. But I doubt it, as every time I see one of those ads I hate Bing I little bit more.

Cheers!

-j

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 3:11 and is filed under Media and Culture, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.