Partner Otaku

It’s been a while since I posted something humorous.  I saw this picture (AP Nati Harnik) of Erich Schmidt holding what appears to be Blackberry device…It’s one thing to to see the rank and file folks carrying various devices, but your CEO? Why doesn’t he eat his own dog food? Especially at the swanky media summit held in Sun Valley, Idaho by the investment bank Allen & Co. Luminaries attending include Bill Gates, LeBron James, Rupert Murdoch and more. Here’s the link to the article. Enquiring minds want to know! Comments anyone?

Microsoft announced Bing at the D Conference in Southern California. The new service, located at bing.com will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, 6/3.

There is nothing like being in third place to help drive innovation. When I first came to Microsoft in 1990, our products were often not the market leaders that they are today. People loved WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. 

Excel version 3 was the breakthrough, I know it’s a cliché with v3 and Microsoft products…I have a physical copy of Excel 3.0 and there is a banner on the box that touts “Now With Toolbar”.  A product with a toolbar sounds very quaint today, but at the time, it brought functionality and dare I say user experience to a new level, no hyperbole intended. 

That bring us to search engines.  Microsoft is a distant third in usage. I always try to eat our own dog food first, but in many cases Live Search didn’t have the relevancy or the results that I was expecting so I used Google.

If you want to be a leader, it’s not sufficient to just improve the quality and relevancy of search results. Microsoft has to do something that is compelling for users to prefer Bing over the competition. Research has shown that 66 percent of people are using Internet search more frequently to make complex decisions (Ipsos 2009, 1156 participants). With that in mind, what could Microsoft do to build a better mouse trap?

Microsoft had three design goals with Bing:

Generate Great Search Results – Only one in four search queries deliver a satisfactory result. Bing helps identify relevant search results through features such as Best Match, where the best answer is surfaced and called out; Deep Links, allowing more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer; and Quick Preview, a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy.

Organized search experience. Trying to categorize and make sense of search results is difficult. Bing includes a number of features that organize search results, including Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results.

Simplify tasks and provide insight. Microsoft’s research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.

Here’s the Bing Decision Engine overview Launch video

Here’s a link to a comparison article:

Microsoft’s Bing Vs Google: Head To Head Search Results

Frankly I was pretty surprised with Ina Fried’s article on news.com regarding which search engine is most popular amongst Microsoft employees.  If you read the article quickly you might be left with the impression that 80% of internal search traffic was going to Google.

At a company meeting about a year ago, one Microsoft worker recalls hearing that four-fifths of the company’s search traffic was going to Google. Although he uses Live Search personally, the worker, who asked not to be named, said plenty of his co-workers still use Google.

However, if you look at the next paragraph the numbers look quite different, pretty much a 50/50 split in February.

Among its full-time U.S. workers, Microsoft says that, for February, Live Search and Google had roughly equal share, at around 48 percent apiece, with little search traffic going to Yahoo or any of the other search players.

I would argue that four-fifths figure as being dubiously high. I use Live/Kumo Search as my primary search engine.  If I don’t receive relevant results, I’ll try Google or Yahoo.  I am confident that most of my coworkers do the same, but I can’t verify my “gut” feel.

Working for Microsoft in the Silicon Valley must be the polar extreme to working in the Redmond area.  It’s akin to being the LA Dodgers playing at the ’stick – for those young enough to remember what it was like back in the 20th century .  Anyhow I thought this was a humorous use of technology:

Apparently there are 24 bits of third party software in Chrome. One of which is the Windows Template Library which was released as Open Source in 2004.  Take a look at Scott Hanselman’s Blog for a deeper dive.

I tend to install software and never read the End User License Agreement.  I’m usually too excited to get the program installed! If you download Google’s Chrome Browser – you may want to consider this issue that was posted on “The Register”.