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% [?]

Image by Esthr via FlickrSo it finally happens, after months of speculation Microsoft has acquired Powerset with a view to integrating it within Live Search.

As a shareholder of Powerset and a friend of Barney Pell, I am obviously delighted with the result. It is kudos to Barney that as a first-time CEO he has been able to build and secure an exit for this business in less than three years.

It’s clear that Powerset has developed some impressive linguistic and semantic analysis technology. They also innovated in the search experience in a way that made it better (not just more complicated). It is also clear that the scale of Microsoft will allow Powerset to build out services more quickly. It may be a while before the whole of the Web is indexed by the technology but I am betting that the top sites (not just Wikipedia) and top blogs/social media will be next.

Popularity: 1% [?]