A couple of days ago I blogged that I was going to attend a Microsoft bing round table. I’ve now attended and here are the key points and interesting facts that I took from the event. You can also search for #meetbing on twitter for relevant tweets.
Bing.com is a re-brand of Live Search
And Microsoft openly admitted this. Basically Live Search wasn’t getting any traction so Microsoft had to do something (see my next point).
“Microsoft believe they will provide as relevant search results as Google in the UK in a number of months #meetbing” @leggetter
What they’ve done is go with a “web 2.0 name” of “Bing” to try and jazz things up a little. They’ve also gone back to basics and want to concentrate on the quality and relevance of search results and believe they will provide as relevant results as Google in a few months and are judging the quality of their results on something called NDCG. I certainly didn’t use Live Search because I found the results pretty useless. Bing definitely returns better results than Live did. An example on this focus on quality is that Bing has only presently indexed around 10 Billion pages which in the scheme of things isn’t very much.
“Only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result. Data from MSN search, tool bar in IE. Could be searching Google, yahoo etc.” @karenblakeman
Microsoft also believe they’ve improved the UX a bit to allow users to refine their search results with the introduction of the quick tabs/suggested links in a menu on the left hand side of the user interface. They’ve done this because they believe that only 1 in 4 searches deliver a successful result so this allows users to more easily find things faster.
Microsoft seem to think the re-branding and basic search tweaks have worked as they showed us data that they believe proves Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as No.2 in the search market. Their source of data to determine where users were going to perform their web search was quite interesting. Their source was the MSN toolbar which is only available to those with Internet Explorer. I guess since IE still has a large share of the market (W3Schools Stats | Wikipedia Stats) that the figures are more or less correct but some people at the event did question this as a suitable source.
The other thing that Microsoft are doing is to integrate Bing as a “search brand” into all their products in the same way that Google integrate Google search into Gmail, Google Docs etc. So, you will now see “Bing” used to power Hotmail search and most probably all other Microsoft sites or web applications over time.
Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo! to become No.2 in search
“Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo to become No.2 in search. Fact admitted here” @leggetter
This may not be a big surprise to some people but I didn’t know that this was Microsoft’s main motivation to buy Yahoo! and I did read a few articles about the attempted purchase. Microsoft admitted that Yahoo! had the No.2 slot and if they bought them they would gain this position in addition to a well-known brand. They also admitted that they may have kept the Yahoo! brand for their search and ditched Live altogether.
Bing UK is in Beta. Bing US is not
Bing UK is lacking a lot of the functionality of Bing US since it’s still in beta. Microsoft wanted to launch Bing and felt it was better to do it world wide so stuck with the beta. Bing UK will move out of Beta when more of the functionality you can see in the US is available in the UK.
Only the standard verticals are being targeted
Local, travel, maps, videos, shopping and news will be the verticals that Microsoft initially target. This is a little disappointing as it would be great to see Microsoft break the mould and do something innovative. The only unique vertical that was mentioned is that a music search function is being worked on by the Bing China team.
All in all I thought it was a worthwhile exercise by Microsoft to tell people what they are doing and gather a number of opinions. The consensus of the people at the event is that Bing is going to have to something different to take a significant portion of people away from Google and their current offering doesn’t offer too much to do this.
I’m simply happy that Microsoft have upped their game and will at least have Google looking over their shoulders albiet way back into the distance. Hopefully this competition will provoke innovation in search that has been generally stagnent for the past few years up until the introduction of the real-time web. Maybe this could be something that Microsoft could excel at?
Click here to view all the #meetbing tweets
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On Monday between 19:00 and 21:00 I’m going to a Bing roundtable (round table) in London. The event is being organise by Colin Mercer and is described as:
a small round-table event to discuss Bing and since we saw your recent tweet regarding comparative search results between Bing and Google, we thought that you might be interested in coming along. The idea would be to get your initial thoughts and you’ll get an update on the future steps for Bing which are being developed specifically for the UK. During the session you’ll have the chance to talk with Microsoft representatives and other people from social media like yourself, who have expressed some early opinion.
It would appear the event is being attended by a number of web 2.0, social media, marketing and internet types.
- Phil Bradley
- Phil is interested in
Internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development.
Phil has confirmed. I recommend following Phil Bradley on Twitter.
- James Barlow
- James Barlow is
an independent consultant specialising in information technology and project/programme management.
- Tom Warren
- I don’t have any additional information on Tom.
- Chris Hambly
- Chris lists himself as a
successful Digital Media Entrepreneur
- Josh Russell
- Josh has tweeted that he’s going. He provides
micro-consulting on web application strategy
- David Stuart
- David is going. David blog provides
thoughts of a Web 2.0 research fellow on all things in the technological sphere that capture his interest.
- Karen Blakeman
- Karen’s blogs about
search tools, Internet technologies and resources for business information.
Karen has confirmed.
- Neil Robinson
- Neil describes himself as
passionate about using the right technology to drive business forward.
- Kevin Harrington
- Looks like Kevin had some initial trouble confirming his attendance but I think he’s coming now.
- Mark Sharp
- Mark designs and runs
a number of websites for myself and for other people and organisations
- Andrea Giammarchi
- Andrea’s profile says
JavaScript Ninja and both PHP/ECMAScript Certified Engineer
We are being encouraged to “live blog” the event.
Please come armed with all of your thoughts, opinions and questions for the Bing team. This meet-up is about everyone getting the chance to have their say. We’ll make sure you’re able to live blog during the event
So, I’ll be armed with my laptop (for tweeting) and HTC Touch Pro (for video, if appropriate) and will try and ask as many questions as possible and get as much information out to the real-time web as I can. My personal angle will be one of technology. For example:
- How Bing are pushing use of the Bing API and Bing developer centre.
- What are they doing to ensure information is available to the real-time web as quickly as possible.
Please let me know if you have any questions that you’d like asked and I’ll do my best to ask them. You can do this in a number of ways. During the event the hashtag in use will be #meetbing. Prior to the event I’d suggest people maybe use #askbing. Failing that you can contact me directly or leave a comment on this blog post.
About a week ago I wrote a blog article at work entitled “What is the real-time web?“. I’m seeing even more tweets and posts about the real-time web and I’d love to hear if other people agree with my opinion on what the real-time web is.
View the What is the real-time web? article here.
To make a cross domain web request with SilverLight 2 really isn’t that tough. I did have some problems with RC0 but I have no idea why. I just tried writing a little app to do this and it worked straight away.
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Here’s a link to a very useful tool that’ll download the latest Google Chrome (well Chromium) nightly build. I decided to use this due to the vertical scrolling issue with Google Chrome that was driving me mad. The bug was present in the release of Google Chrome but fixed in the nightly builds.
Chromium Nightly Downloader
Update: 02/10/2008
I’ve been looking into getting SilverLight to work with Google Chrome or Chromium and came across a post about something called Chrome Channel Switcher which looks like it automatically updates your Chrome install to either Beta or Development builds. Could be useful! There are links directly to the executable download from Jon Galloway’s blog post.
Google is slowly moving away from its simple basic colour look to a new – but still simple – Web 2.0 look.
Read more »
Rob of GIS Consultancy fame recently sent me a link to a website dedicated to tracking and fixing of neighbourhood problems. The Neighbourhood Fix It website is a great idea and it actually works. I reported the dumping of a load of newspapers and leaflets outside of our flat that were just waiting to be set on fire. That same day the Edinburgh “Rapid Response Team” had been out and picked up the papers and leaflets.
Neighbourhood Fix It must have a mapping of post codes to councils and automatically inform the council of any reports in their jurisdiction. The site has been developed by mySociety who aim to “give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives”. I think that Neighbourhood Fix It is a great piece of work and a great example.
Read more on the launch of Neighbourhood Fix It.
With the reasonable success of Bring Back Beckham! I decided to push forward with my next project. The idea behind England Goals was to create a site that lists all the goals scored by the England football team and use the increase in the number of goals that can be found on external video sites to my advantage by embedding these user uploaded videos as content.
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Back in October 2006 I had an idea for a website. I tend to come up with a variety of ideas for things, most of which I add a .com to the end of. This time my idea was based around the fact that the England football team were in terrible form having drawn 0-0 with Macedonia and that Steve McClaren, the England manager, was refusing to pick England’s, and the world’s, most recognised footballer, David Beckham.
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Mapping APIs have been around for ages now and all the big guns (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) have thrown their hat into the ring. You can even get a Google maps plugin for wordpress plugin to allow you to easily put a map in your blog.
Wow, it’s Edinburgh
There’s even an API that allows you to switch between using all three – but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated in quite a while.
All these examples exploded onto the scene but haven’t really made any major advances, that my naked eye can see, for quite a while. Why is this? Is it that they are as good as they can possibly get? Or is development stagnant for another reason? Maybe it’s lack of data! Whilst people are forever creating mashups of this on top of that with a little bit of the other thrown in the unfortunate thing for me is that there hasn’t really been anything that has blown my mind since the very early days of DHTML maps. Somebody please prove me wrong!
Maybe it’s time for the OS to start setting the data free so that people can actually benefit from the high quality data without paying through the nose – then maybe we’ll see some great UK mashups.
