Comments

• Needs Sunlight

  2009-06-08 09:22:34

  It would seem that the noise is about saturating the media with chaff about the new name for MS old search product. The purpose of that would be to use up any possible quota dedicated to search services so that Wolfram Alpha is over-shadowed.
  
  http://www.wolframalpha.com/
  
  Wolfram Alpha is quite interesting and seems to show some *very* interesting potential. Right now it looks to focus within the hard sciences, but the service could expand to other fields.

• David Gerard

  2009-06-08 12:42:37

  Despite Wolfram Alpha being hilariously bad as a search engine, I've actually found it useful for scientific questions that would otherwise occasion dredging through Wikipedia, e.g. the surface area of a human body - WA comes up with a *calculator* to answer the question!
  
  It's a small niche, but it's a niche, and it's good at it. That's quite enough to start from.
  
  Bing lacks a niche. There's no unique value proposition. There's talk of one in the marketing, but none evident in using it.

• contextfree

  2009-06-09 00:37:39

  "A few days ago, Pamela Jones wrote in Grokaw, 'I suggest you search for ODF on both Bing and Google and see which one is more informative.'"
  
  erm, I get pretty much the same stuff, except google has a couple of links to Microsoft's Doug Mahugh's blog on the first page, actually, while the first page of bing results contains no MS-affiliated sites. not sure how that fits into your narrative.

• twitter

  2009-06-08 14:32:02

  Regulatory attention to M$'s search efforts is long overdue. Wired has covered M$'s attempts to kill Google but this only scratches the surface of M$'s usual practices. It is inexcusable for the US government to allow a company that's been judged an abusive monopoly to use it's monopoly position to fund invade yet more fields and services in support of it's original and harmful monopoly. M$'s search efforts have all been failures but failure is not a useful criteria to judge criminal intent. A person who fails to extract money from the corner grocery store is still an armed robber if he pointed a gun. M$ has astroturfed, modified it's software, sabotaged other's software (.NET stuck into Mozilla), and probably does a whole lot more to push it's way into search. Society should move quickly to protect itself from this kind of abuse. The first and easiest move is to quit purchasing M$ software and use free software instead.

• Roy Schestowitz

  2009-06-08 14:35:56

  It seems as though US-based regulators got paralyzed in the sense that regulatory agencies got captured by cronies. I hope the EU Commission will respond.