Release 0.9: Parsing Microsoft's Bing

I watched the unveiling of Microsoft's Bing at AllThingsD yesterday, and was way more impressed than I expected. Of course, I should have known: Basically, it was Powerset repotted in fertile soil with lots of nutrients... I was an investor in Powerset, and it was a gratifying moment: like seeing your kid up on stage in well-deserved glory.

A few points to make:

How the world turns. If Microsoft had done this oh, say, five years ago, it would have been accused of grandiosity, taking over the Internet, etc. It's great for consumers and for marketers of products/services, but not so good for intermediaries such as Orbitz and all kinds of shopping sites. MS is bidding to become the intermediary -- or partnering with specific ones such as Open Table. And, years later but a month before now, if Google had offered a similar service, Google would have faced the same accusations. But if Google does something similar now (and it certainly has some of these same capabilities somewhere in the lab and somewhere in its mind), it will seem like a justified response. God bless competition!

Another interest group that may suffer: all those companies who made it so difficult for consumers to call them directly. With Bing surfacing their 800 numbers, they will have to become more responsive. I hope they don't respond by enlarging their voicemail trees.

Finally, what's interesting here is that the achievements aren't in search per se or even in the natural language interface; they are in the structuring of the data. Search, in a way, is like shining a spotlight into a dark room: You see a few things shining in the dark, but you can't really see what or where they are in context. Bing is like turning on the light and even tidying things up a bit so you can find what you're looking for, nicely arranged in transparent data drawers.

Last year at D, I (plus some other acolytes) had dinner with Bill Gates, who said something he had not pointed out on stage: "The future of search is verbs." In other words, you want actions, not just data/nouns. You want to reserve a table, book a flight, call a support line.

Shout-out to Barney Pell, and to MS overcoming its own immune system and neatly grafting in some cool technology plus a lot of real-world knowledge in specific domains. Algorithms alone are not enough.

Comments

[RofWH]

"I hope they don't respond by enlarging their voicemail trees."

I would rather fight my way through the 'phone trees than through the forest of heavily accented Norman from Mumbai tech service where you are taken through a cookbook of fixes, none of which work. Then you have to wend your way out of the mess that was made to your system by doing these "fixes."

[DangerWillRobinson]

I figured why not try it and did a search for Paris, Marais. As far as I could see, all the results that came back on Bing, were for hotels and travel sites. Commercial sites.

The same search on Google resulted in much more fleshed out generic results which included walking tours, museum guides, maps, videos and such.

I don't believe i'll be using Bing.

[mergina]

Microsoft has simply, once again, ripped off someone else's hard work. It is all they have been doing since their inception.

[sifta]

Just for the record, didn't they buy powerset?

[XCITIZEN]

And OMG I am so SICK of slick, clever, over-marketed products (which are inferior) from rip-off companies that are too big and ugly to have viability but insist on sucking the life out of everything like a giant vacuum cleaner.

It has gotten to the point that 'I was not initially disappointed' is a compliment.

Bing - ugh. I have no interest whatsoever.

NEXT!

[XCITIZEN]

Is it a new yogurt drink? A type of car? Is it a new berry flavored gum? An exciting new shoe? A snowboard? A new type of lip gloss?

Or is it another new accessory one can plug into another exciting product whose name sounds virtually the same, but quirkily different. UGH...BLECH...

[emailers2]

For the last several years I have pared back my use of Microsoft products. Life without the use of Outlook, IE, and their Office suite is not only manageable but very productive. True, I grew up using WordPerfect which for my word processing tasks is still easier for me to use.

No doubt about it, I am a bit impatient with the learning curve when I have a brief to write and rarely use Word. Still, I have purposefully sought out other products that are not made by Microsoft in part because they function better for my purposes and in part because I am not interested in supporting the behemoth.

Recently, Steve Balmer threatened the USA with off shoring jobs if certain taxes are imposed. Imagine the hubris of this threat from a major American Corporation that has benefitted from favorable tax breaks not given to small businesses or individuals as well as numerous other laws. I am still stunned that he made his threat public. Does he think that we would not notice?

Why would I want to support a company that does not want to pay their fare share of taxes? I will continue to use search engines other than Microsoft. I am not even interested in trying their new search engine.

[GardenerNorCal]

It's attractive but I fail to see where it's innovative.

[Indra]

Most people do not know enough about the computing industry to realize that Microsoft is not any where to9 being innovative. Kids on my block design better software than they do for god's sake. Now a lot of people don't believe me when I say this but just remember it was Bill Gates who got started in a garage and busted big blues nuts. Just a couple of kid's on the block. How soon they all forget!

[losangelian1]

Wow, I thought 'Zune' was the lamest name out there... but 'Bing' might take the cake.

[oldtree]

hilarious! When will they rename it Gobi or perhaps Sahara? Mojave is taken, but there are plenty more desert options for it. The desert hides so many things below the sand. Ask the mayor of Vegas.

[BlueOnBlue]

I looked at the trailer for Bing and my main impression was that this is mainly designed as a way to deposit more money into Microsoft's coffers. I know, the point of a business is to make money, but Microsoft seems to have a way of putting its interests first before the interests of consumers or even of its own products.

Watching the trailer, I was struck by how many of their examples ended with a dollar sign displayed, taking you to a way to purchase a product via a Microsoft-sponsored link or via one of its other services (e.g., Expedia). The only exception seemed to be the search for medical info, but I'm not putting it past MS to charge the Mayo Clinic for giving them prominence in the searches. Or buying the Mayo Clinic.

We've come to trust Google not only for the efficiency of its search engine, but also because it has always clearly delineated paid links in its search results. At the very least, you know when someone is paying to get your attention. Microsoft blurs that line - always has - always will. With them, it's bucks first, products and customers last.

While it may be an anti-google acronym, as some have suggested, I think they named it "bing" after the sound of a cash register.

[rlintw]

Yeah, Google isn't about the money. Geez, what nonsense.

[BlueOnBlue]

Do you read things in context, or only focus on one or two words at a time? I didn't say anything about google not being interested in money. It was about how MS blurs the line between paid and unpaid content (i.e., advertising). Almost anyone on the net trying to make money takes advertising, but only the unscrupulous try to pass it off as unbiased content.

MS, like you, doesn't seem to care about the difference.

[Navision]

Aren't they a little late to the party. They should have come out with a search engine over 5 years ago if they wanted to compete in the search engine arena.

It looks to me like MS can't come up with any new products. It will be very hard for them to compete in this arena.

[bobdob]

As a small online retailer, this is a distressing turn of events. Does Microsoft get to decide what information is relevant to the query? And do I need to pay them in order to be considered relevant? They brag that they no longer display results based upon popularity. What criteria will they be using? Advertisers who pay them the most money? I always suspected that big corporations would find a way to take over and control content. This looks like a good first step.

This looks like a class action suit or another anti-trust suit in the making.

[GeneralDisarray]

just dont use it, I won't

[CAPTAINSKIPPY]

Fine. Let me know when the product is bug-free and doesn't need a steady stream of updates and upgrades. Thank you!

[bobdob]

It's a search engine. WTF are you talking about?

[WilliePilgrim]

When R.Buckminster Fuller talked about being a verb, as in "I seem to be a verb..." I was inspired and enlightened. When Gates says that people are all about verbs, all I can see is a yakking paperclip and an overweight nebbish in a rubber butterfly suit. I have a feeling that Google, or some organization that's focused on advancement (and not simply keeping a lot of overpayed engineers and marketeers employed) takes the lead the curious and engaged will take notice. In the mean time, hope you had a nice dinner.

[rlintw]

I repeat, yeah, Google isn't about the money. What a load of bull.

[Halford]

This piece is a thinly disguised advertisement for
Microsoft.

[Citizen54]

But... but it was written by someone who is a self-proclaimed "acolyte."
So how could it be wrong?

[zull2]

I'll believe it when I see it. I've been using search engines since the original WebCrawler back in 1994. Every new search engine promises to be more ordered and better than the last. Then they fall into one or more of the three following problems:

One: The more pages you index, the more search results, and the bigger the mess you get into in regards to prioritizing results and matching the right page to the search.

Two: Financial greed. The more you try to make money on it, the more cluttered and confusing the search gets, until users get fed up and use something less overwhelming.

Three: The more you try and organize the clutter, the more overhead (aka, time) it takes for each web search. That's fine on an extremely high speed connection, but lousy if you're using your smartphone's data plan, a low end DSL line, an overburdened university or library network, etc.

When your search engine is new and shiny, those problems aren't there yet. When your search has been around long enough, your users get tired and find a new shiny search engine.

[KillTheMessenger]

Actually, you need to add a fourth thing: search engine optimization. Search engines are up against a phalanx of people who are making their money with pushing irrelevant search results up the ranking algorithm of the search engine. That's what their customers pay them to do. So you really have a contest between an algorithm (or a set thereof) and human brains. So far the humans are winning... we might have lost chess to the machines, but search engine optimization we have won every single time, even against Google's moloch. As a result all search is as bad as the "optimizers" want it to be.