It was going to be a tough audience, information professionals with their finger on the pulse, we wanted to know what we could get from this for our users, where the educational advantages would be. What we got was the big guns. We got the pretty pictures. I wish I'd taken a stopwatch to measure how long he talked about the front page of the engine and perhaps one of those clicky things so I could reckon how many times he said 'bing experience'. You can probably tell by now that I wasn't impressed, but I couldn't take my feelings of underwhelment out on the chap from corporate, he was affable enough and confessed to leaving the 'how it works' side to the techies. He did admit to being tied to Vista though. However you feel about that.
I have to admit being slightly surprised by the warmth of the reception; I really thought that this guy would have his work cut out for him. His patter and charm kept him on the topics he wanted to discuss: I raised questions on functionality, he talked about user experience; I wanted to know the rationale behind the results on offer, he brought us back to the (admittedly) good presentation of them. Each awkward question, and reader, I had many, asked was deflected flawlessly, sometimes with bamboozling nonsense like 'it's a trusted, untrusted source'. Slick charm and bamboozlement is a powerful combination, it settles you into a comfortable place, smoothes the worry lines from your brow and reassures you; you don't need to worry about things like that, let us worry about that for you.
We should worry though. The web can make naive fools of us all, accepting and downloading information and much more without the critical scrutiny we would apply to a movie review or a newspaper article.
So what's bing like? Well, he thinks it takes seven solid days of bing immersion to knock the Google out of you, admittedly I didn't do the whole week- but I did do an afternoon. I was neither greatly impressed or disgusted by the main search function, results seemed fairly comparable with what I'd expect from Google, ads were in the same place. It was actually better than I feared, which ought not to be read as an endorsement. Mr Corporate spoke at length about his choice demographics, their use of social networking and their comfort with online shopping: I thought that I wouldn't be able to find an academic on there for all the celebs. I found Peter Jones of the University of Newcastle, not an easy one. I also found Winston Churchill on xRank, their celebrity movers and shakers list, he came in at a respectable 90th. The presence of Cream the 60s supergroup and hairy rockers Queen in the top three, beating the likes of JLS and Lady Gaga into submission, suggests that xRank may be a little too heavily influenced by non-contextual keywords. Who would have thought Cream would be more popular that Harvey Milk, eh?
Away from dairy and onto my last beef of the post. A left hand side menu allows you to access bing's 'references' section, this was the nice corporate laddie's concession to his becardigan'd audience, in fact it is bing's only concession to scholarly thinking. Sadly the references function merely pulls up a Wikipedia article. I'm not a knowledge snob, but that's not good enough for me or my readers. Frankly, the news that Churchill is more famous than Russel Grant, but not as hip as Lemar was far more useful. Their purchase of Wolfram Alpha may change their quality of referencing, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
**Bonus**
Add Wolfram Alpha seaches to your standard Google search using this Mozilla app, it goes without saying that you do need to be running Firefox to do that, and a pretty new version.
Very useful for fact checking and not looking stupid, all because someone has changed the Wikipedia article to list Timbuktu as the capital of the Maldives.
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