I heard that Microsoft has some excellent $0.10 deals for Windows 10 owners like me. So I checked Bing:

The top hit (an ad by Microsoft) takes you to a page for corporate sales of Windows phones.

The second hit (an ad by Microsoft) takes you to the generic Microsoft Store front page from which it is virtually impossible to find the $0.10 sales.

None of the rest of the results on the first page of the Bing search gets you anywhere close.

Same search at Google:

The top hit (a Microsoft ad) takes you to the same generic front page of the Microsoft Store as the second hit on Bing, which makes no mention of the $0.10 sales.

The following Google results take you to pages about the $0.10 sales from which you can actually get to the goddamn sale.

Yes, these sales are real. For example, this is from the Microsoft.com site this afternoon:

I got there by going to the WindowsCentral.com post listed in the Google results….although right now the Windows site is telling me that something is wrong and I should come back later.

PS: To get to the Hitman Go sale, my best advice is to go to the Windows Store on your Windows 10 machine. The $0.10 sales are featured there. Or search there for Hitman Go.

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Bing, Google and Yahoo have announced schema.org, where you can find markup to embed in your HTML that will help those search engines figure out whether you’re talking about a movie, a person, a recipe, etc. The markup seems quite simple. But, more important, by using it your page is more likely to be returned when someone is looking for what your page talks about.

Having the Big Three search engines dictating the metadata form is likely to be a successful move. SEO is a powerful motivator.

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Google vs. Yahoo

Google vs. WolframAlpha

Google vs. Bing

(via Keith Dawson)

[Tags: google search bing wolframalpha ]

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I’ve been poking around Microsoft’s Bing. The short answer is that it’s not going to move me off of Google. Of course, my Google inertia is pretty much sleeping-hippopotamus-like at this point. Plus, Bing’s ripping off of Kayak.com (see below) has me pretty cheesed.

Bing does some useful and clever things. But, I think some of the coverage has actually undersold Google. For example, Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe, whose writing I like a lot, today opens his review with the clever idea of searching for “google” at Bing and for “bing” at Google. He says Bing gives you a concentrated dosage of stuff about Google, while Google is all over the map with its “bing” results. Well, sure! “Google” is a made-up word with only one dominant meaning, so of course Bing gives you concentrated Google goodness. But “Bing” has lots of meanings, so Google’s right to return a mix of bingy words…with Microsoft Bing as the top result. Now, it is true that, as Hiawatha says, Microsoft gives its “Google” results in convenient tabs about Microsoft the corporate entity as well as listing sub-pages within the google domain, while Google’s top return on “Microsoft” only gives you a set of sub-pages. Microsoft looks more like WolframAlpha in that regard, and that’s a good way to look. But, Google also recently added easier ways to refine and expand searches (by timeline, by WonderWheel), etc., as Hiawatha points out. So, it really depends on what you’re trying to do. As always. (Type MSFT into either and you’ll get similar boxed stock data.)

Hiawatha writes: “Say you want the latest weather or traffic data. Google will tell you where to get it. Bing will just give it to you.” Not exactly. Type “weather” into either site and you get your local weather at the top, in pretty much identical displays. Google’s been doing that for quite a while. Likewise, type an airline and flight number and Google will tell you if it’s on time. But the “traffic” trick doesn’t work for Google. For that you have to go to Google Maps and click on the “Traffic” button (assuming you’re signed in). I wonder how long it’ll take Google to add Bing’s way of responding.

When it comes to shopping, Bing has some very nice touches. Well, primarily it has faceted classification — like NewEgg.com, and also using Endeca‘s engine? — that lets you sort a big list based on multiple criteria, using any of them in any order. Also, Bing has separate ratings by users and experts. On the other hand, Google found many many more copies of “splinter cell double agent” for sale than Bing did.

As many have noted, Bing’s handling of video searches is stellar. Hover over any of the thumbnails and the thumbnail starts to play. But, as someone pointed out — sorry, I lost the link — there seems to be no way to keep users from turning off the adult filter, which means that every school and library now has the greatest multi-screen porn browser ever invented. You can browse for porn videos on Google, of course, but with Bing it’s like watching all of them all at once. Well, maybe this will be like catching a kid smoking and making him smoke an entire pack all at once.

And now we come to Bing’s travel searches. OMG. Bing blatantly ripped off Kayak.com. [Disclosure: I’m old friends with the Kayak folks.] Just take a look at this post. If you’re going to rip off an innovative design, then at least innovate on top of it! Grrrr…

[Tags: bing google search wolframalpha everything_is_miscellaneous kayak ]

Later that morning: I just came across a very amusing article in Ars Technica about the new Google Squared app that puts info into tables. It makes clear why some sites (e.g., WolframAlpha) are willing to pay the price to gain the benefits of curation. (via Lee Baker, Berkman summer intern)

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