Phil Bradley's weblog

Bing gone! Microsoft launch new search engine. Almost.

Bing. Well, we knew it was coming, and it's not quite here yet, but Microsoft is slowly lumbering around, yawning, scratching itself in unmentionable places, putting the coffee on and thinking about launching its new search engine. There's a video available at http://www.decisionengine.com/ and it so reminds me of the way in which Common Craft voice over their excellent tutorials. "but sometimes <pause, lower voice in a conspiritorial manner> search isn't enough."

Apparently what we have here is a decision engine. I'm only going on what I've seen in the video, so this is far from any sort of sensible review, but I can only work with what Microsoft give us, so blame them. There's a huge emphasis on using the resource to buy, save money, go on holiday, do home decorating and so on.

"We started just by organising our results" Well, that's a good step in the right direction - novel idea as well, since no-one has thought of doing THAT before!

"We rate them into logical categories" Right, so you're doing clustering. That's not new either. The top result allows you to go right into the site to key pages. Hey - that's just what Google does! Isn't that a surprise. Further down the page we have a map of listings near a city for 'Home Depot' (the example search), and y'know - Google does exactly the same thing!

"We highlight instant answers" Hmm - isn't that a term that Ask has used in the past?

"We show related searches right there on the results page". Yes, Google does that too, and so do many other search engines. My goodness, this is a new search engine, bursting with concepts I've never come across before!

Shopping for digital cameras, Bing brings together price comparisions and reviews with a page that looks remarkably like Amazon in many respects.

"Even better, Bing gets you cash back". Yes, that's very helpful with the majority of searches that I'm likely to do. This is a tired line and you've been doing it for a while now Microsoft - how about showing me something new?

Bing pulls in information from top medical sites, "so you can be confident that you're not taking the advice of a 13 year old boy." Gee, could you GET any more patronising? If you really think that users are doing to be doing this you must really have a low opinion of your users.

Bing searches travel sites and airlines to get the best ticket options. Yeah, great. This makes it a world beater doesn't it! There's a bunch of rubbish about restaurants as well.

"The world doesn't need just another search engine. It needs a decision engine." This really is dross of the highest order. There wasn't a single thing in the video that was new, exciting, different or innovative. It's just a collection of things that other search engines have been doing for some considerable time, wrapped up in a less than exciting presentation.

Microsoft - if this is really the best that you can do, could you please just stop now? It's insulting the intelligence of users, it's a waste of our time and it's really just embarassing.

Browsys adds virtual search folders & Twoogle

Browsys is a multi search engine, in that it has a variety of tabs along the screen enabling you to run a search on your engine of choice. It's a nice engine that does a good job and if you've not tried it, I'd encourage you to do so. However, that's not the purpose of this post. They've recently added Virtual search folders as an option. This is a set of tabs that have been created and point to major sites that you might be interested in. There's the Google tools tab for example taking you to major Google sites, or the Technology or World News options. The idea is simple - you can use these as a quick way of browsing through sites that interest you - a little like the bookmarks option that you'll find in start pages.

What's interesting however is that you can save the tab to your browser, or send it to other people. I created a set of tabs for sites that are mine or linked to me in some way; weblog, site and so on. You'll need to look at the tabs at the top of screen to recognise this however, since you'll still see the default folders in the body of the page. I've added a screenshot for you:

My user created tabs are at the top, to the right of 'Start'. Annoyingly the 3 at the end are not mine (Wikipedia, Maps, YouTube), but the system seems to want 10 links and if you don't give it ten it simply adds in default options which is silly and annoying. I also couldn't see a way of adding the 'Phil Bradley' folder to the featured virtual folders. Even more annoying - when you leave the page you leave the folder behind as well - the only way of getting it back is to remember the link to it. This really restricts what you can do with this, and I hope that Browsys will find some way to overcome this since it's a fatal flaw in my opinion. If you could store these folders, make them default choices it would be a great idea to make that page a default browser home page for public machines. So, 8/10 for idea but only 4/10 for execution of concept.

The second resource Browsys has added is called Twoogle. No prizes if you've worked out that it's a cross over app for Twitter and Google. Screen shot below:

It's an okay application, except that you have to scroll horizontally in order to see the full content which is irritating. It does tend to leave me thinking 'Yes, and?' but perhaps that's just me.

Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 173 June 2009

Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 173 June 2009. This is now available for your reading pleasure.

SearchMerge

SearchMerge is a multi search engine, pulling results from Google, Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed, Flickr and Last.FM (if you're in the right location I think for that last one). Very simple - just pop in some terms and you're good to go. 3 search options available to you - Search, I'm feeling lucky and Real Time. Results are short summaries and titles. No help, no indication of what is available with regards functionality, so nothing unusual there.

Will I use it? Probably not. It's a fair mix of resources, but a bit too broad and not enough options for my liking. However - give it a whirl yourself!

Thanks to Intute for the headsup on this one.

SimilarSites

SimilarSites - Find Similar Sites. No prizes for guessing what this site does. Yup - type in a URL and it will try and find sites that are - well - similar to that one. I tried various different sites and I was satisfied with the results that I got. There are a few of these sites appearing now and I've got a listing of them at http://www.philb.com/sitebasedinfo.htm#similar. My favourite is still InSuggest however since it's smooth, well put together, attractive and lets you add more sites to focus your search.

Wolfram|Alpha - computational is the key word!

I've seen lots of reviews of Wolfram|Alpha now - I've only recently had a chance to play around with it, and it's certainly different. Let's start with the blindingly obvious - it's not a search engine. Yes, I know that it's called an engine, though they say that it's a computational knowledge engine, and this is the key difference. Too many people are trying to use it in the way that they use Google et al, and this just doesn't work - it's like expecting an encyclopedia to give you the address of the local takeaway; doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the reference tool - it's just being used in the wrong way. It's like asking a librarian what pi is to 150 places - the librarian can find a resource that gives you the answer, while a mathematician can work it out for you. Both entirely valid ways of answering the question, but totally different answers. So, before we can progress with an understanding of WA it's absolutely key to put aside thoughts of 'Google killers'. (If you want a 'killer' reference, I'd be more inclined to look towards it being a Wikipedia killer.)

Most reviewers (including me) will start a search by looking for themselves. We normally know where we're referenced, how many references there are and so on. However, if you do this over at WA you get information about the names 'phil' and 'bradley'. We learn that Phil and Bradley are male given names, latest information for US births (1976 for phil and 2007 for bradley), history of US births from 1880 to date, estimates for current US population and estimated current age distribution. The source data for this comes from 6 different places, all of which are listed. The age of some of the data is disappointing - 1976 isn't exactly that helpful. It's also a shame that we're only getting content from the United States - adding in UK or England just confuses the engine, and we get no results.

Trying a date also gives really different information (remember the computational element here!), because if I type in a date such as April 9 1865 I learn a lot about the date - that it fell on a Sunday, it was 144 years, 1 month and 10 days ago. (Lovely little cut and paste function there which I only discovered when trying it!). It's also the 99th day of the year, the date that the American Civil War ended, sunrise/sunset information and the phase of the moon. A search on the same date in Google emphasises the historical information, rather than anything else.

Another example of the computational element - a search for population england china india france germany provides a summary of the total population for those countries, highest and lowest, tabular data, population history, and a huge slew of data on the demographics. This content is taken from many different (listed) sources, and they're fairly current. However, while it did give the population for my local town, this was dated to 2004. On the other hand, the same search in Google gives me a more recent, but much less precise figure.

A search for 25 australian dollars sterling in WA gave me an answer of £12.49, an exchange history and additional conversions. Google didn't give me a proper result until I put 'in sterling' into the search. Google gave me a figure of £12.51 and it was difficult to get more content from Google that was comparable to WA.

I liked WA, but think it's been insanely overhyped. I'm concerned about the sources used, the US bias and the date of the information returned to me, but hopefully this will improve over time. The bottom line is that if you need an answer, ask Google. If you need an answer worked out, ask WA.

Web companies from the original web 2.0 logo collage which are still going

Web companies from the original web 2.0 logo collage which are still going
Originally uploaded by Meg Pickard.

This is a great image - many people use the original version of this (I know that I do in my own presentations) to demonstrate Web 2.0 companies via their logos. This is the updated version with blanks for the companies who are no longer in the game. I don't think this shows that Web 2.0 is dying or anything nonsensical like that - I suspect (certainly in the current climate) you could reproduce this for any company grouping. I'm pleased to see so many of them still producing good content/resources for people to use!

Google results page just gets messier!

Once upon a time Google provided a nice straightforward page of results that you could quickly scroll through to find the information that you wanted. However, other search engines started to provide blended results, such as the late unlamented Ask with their 3D view, so Google decided to add Universal search, and combine results from different places. Then it decided to get clever and suggest results for the search that it thought you wanted. Then of course there were related searches, blog postings and so on.

This has left Google with a real headache, and they've no real idea on how to approach the problem. The advertising on the right hand side which has been there forever means that they can't really encroach the right side. Putting content onto the left hand side is possible, but that's pretty much reserved for more menus, despite the fact that there's menus already at the top of the screen. Oh yes, and menus at the bottom of the screen as well. So the only approach they have left is to go across the screen. And this tends to merge content together.

Let's look at a example page from Google UK for a Gordon Brown search:
So going down the page we have some top results; it's nice to see that the UK version does put the #10 Downing Street above the Wikipedia entry, unlike the .com version. Next we have a link to some suggested results for Gordon Brown estate agents, then a bunch of other results. Then some video results, and some news results. Then back to 'normal' results. Then some blog post results. Then some searches related to Gordon Brown, links to the next pages, another search box, then another menu.

Just how messy do they intend on getting? Results are all over the shop, searchers have to scroll down the entire page hunting for the information that they're interested in; the whole thing is a disaster area!

Do NOT use ejeboo!

One of the problems of playing around with a bunch of search engines is that sometimes you find out things by mistake, and ejeboo is an example of this. I wrote about it some time ago, and one of the things that impressed me was the ability to integrate search results into Twitter. Of course, in order to find out how useful this was going to be I had to try it out. Unfortunately there's a slight flaw in the resource because there's no way to turn it off again!

I can add more terms into a twitter alert, which goes to @videoalerts and they will either DM new search results or will simply tweet them to you, as you'll see if you visit their page. I stopped following them, which meant rather than a DM it's just an alert to @philbradley and this doesn't actually stop even if I block them. Consequently if I ever search for myself on Twitter I get all this rubbish that's produced on a daily basis by ejeboo.

They don't have an email account listed in their 'About' page. I've emailed the 'Email alert' address with no response. I can't DM them directly on Twitter since they're not following me. It really does seem to be a case of 'the lights are on, but no-one is home'.

Scoopler: Real-time search

Scoopler is a real-time search engine. It aggregates and organizes content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. It indexs live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.

It's very simple, straight forward and easy to use. My preference is still for SocialMention however.