azeem.azhar

So Bing may or may not be better than Google, whatever better means. What does better mean?

The trouble is that I love Google and I love the language and tone it uses. They have thought exceptionally hard about how it needs to sound. In the same way Apple thought exceptionally hard about every key on the iPhone. Bing looks like it has been tested to destruction by product marketers, segmenting and segmenting away.

But here are three really easy tricks to make Bing ‘beat’ Google:

1. Allow me access to my Google apps: I use GMail, Gcal and a whole lot of other G’s. Bing tries to force me to change tons of my usage paradigms by sticking a link to Hotmail and Microsoft Maps on its toolbar. The absurdity. It is a lot easier to get me to change search engines than get me to change every other part of my life. Don’t force me to swap an entire user experience when Hotmail doesn’t hold a candle to Gmail.I want to be able to click to my mail from my searchengine, and ideally from my search engine to my mail. (The latter might be harder–possible a Firefox extension or greasemonkey script).

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Popularity: 32% [?]

I put together a quick Bing vs Google review. I find Bing a bit ‘meh’ to be honest. Nothing in their that is radically better. And unfortunately, hard to see how Bing will get consumers to switch to using it for some of their searches while continuing to use Google for others.

I tried to embed the review but couldn’t. Find it here.

Also very suprised that Bing have chosen to ape but not clone/copy Google’s UI despite hard evidence that people just prefer Google’s look and feel even when the results are served up by MSN or Yahoo.

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Popularity: 50% [?]

This may be really obvious but… while playing around with Google voice search on my iPhone and Bold I noticed something: I had a cognitive lock.

Speaking into the handset the only queries that came to mind were classic local queries. ‘Pizza restaurant W2′, ‘Cycle repair, NW3′. I tried very hard to come up with a ‘classic Google query’ (something I do from time to time on my Bold). And it was hard, it felt wrong, to be speaking into the phone and not asking a local query. Even when I tried a tech query I came up with ‘Apple dealership’ (which Google Voice on the Bold handily turns into a local query).

Somehow it doesn’t seem right to be querying ‘Cool wordpress modules’ through my headset….

Popularity: 2% [?]

I was two parts astonished and one part unsurprised to discover that Google was going to get into corporate venturing.

The traditional case for corporate venturing–which is often based on solid academe (e.g. Block, Chesborough, Birkenshaw, Dushnitsky) goes like this:

• Not all the smart people live inside our company. There are tons of smarts outside our company and venturing or minority-investing will help us access this
• We can leverage our balance sheet without hurting earnings by taking small stakes in emerging companies
• As an quoted, operating company we can’t take the risks or afford the uncertainty that new ventures targeting new customer segments or using new technology create.
• Venturing is a cheap way for us to get a good sense of the dealflow in the market
• It won’t cost anything—even if we fail over several years, we’ll only have a writedown of a few hundred million dollars which in the scale of our company is nothing. And who knows, we might pick the next Facebook, er, Google, and then we’ll look really smart
• We need a full armory of innovation tools to ensure we continue to innovate. That armory includes innovation programmes, brain storms, partnerships, McKinsey, BCG, etc, etc and—of course—a venture program.
• The academic studies do support corporate venturing as a driver of value-add (as measured by Tobin’s Q)

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Popularity: 18% [?]

I have been mucking around with Aardvark, the new social search engine which has been making the rounds.

The premise is simple: use Aardvark to ask a question. Aardvark will then route the question to your friends and their friends and hopefully find someone who is qualified to give an answer (and who then gives an answer).

It is sort of a use case that we see on Twitter: “Can anyone recommend me an Indian restaurant in Manhattan?” or ” What is the default password on a new WordPress blog?” but in this case Aardvark aims to route your request across multiple friend-of-friend networks.

When you sign up for Aardvark you need to give a list of topics you feel qualified to answer. These in-turn will drive the routing of questions.

So what is good about Aardvark?

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown Mike Arrington is rightly dumbfounded to hear that search is 90% done. Marissa Mayer said as a much to the LA Times.

From one perspective–where you look at search and the solution to it as being indexing document and making statistical connections from queries to documents–perhaps the game nearly is done. In other words, if you measure the success of search engines against the yardstick of what they already do, then I guess they are there.

In the same way that the grand ocean liners were the pinnacle, nay the 95% done of transatlantic travel, until, er, the jet age. Or that Bessie, my trusty shire horse, was the best way of getting from London to Windsor on a rainy day.

This is setting up for a classic Clayton Christensen disruption where the way in which the problem is framed limits the way in which resources are allocated to crack the problem (from an R&D stand point) and then suffocates it (from a commercialisation standpoint).

Forgetting for a moment what other companies are trying, start from the stand point of the end user.

I have been at internet user for seventeen years (nearly half my life), I remember the days of Archie, Veronica, Gopher (but no Jughead). And having worked with two search companies, even today I will struggle with certain types of search queries:
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Popularity: 2% [?]