Phil Bradley's weblog

Bing promoting porn?

OK, here's the thing. I went along to Bing today and was going to look for a video, so with a blank search box clicked on the Video option. This is what I got:

UK Girls, Porn, Naked Men,  Dogging, Sex, Vulva. Admittedly I was searching with a No filter option enabled, but I wasn't logged in. I'm not particularly bothered in some respects because these things can just be ignored, but I'm curious. Do they put up these options because they're popular video search terms, or because Bing naturally assumes that is going to bring in the clicks? Of course, having an unfiltered option means that I'm going to see stuff that I otherwise wouldn't - but I think that there's a difference between that and Bing actively pushing pornographic material in my direction!

Bing continues to move towards social

If you've been to any of my talks recently you'll know that I'm continually banging on about the fact that search is becoming far more social than it has ever been in the past, and that it will continue to do so in the future. The role and the importance of the individual in +1ing things, or 'Liking' them on Facebook, or blogging about them and so on. Google is increasingly using social markers to affect the ranking of the results that you get if you're logging in when you search.

Bing has also stepped up its game with Bing Social for example. They have also included a new pane in the search results that talks about 'People who know', slightly similar to the links to people that Google pulls from G+. Unfortunately this isn't yet available in the most of the world - it still seems pretty much limited to the US, so I have had to steal a visual from the ever wonderful SearchEngineWatch to illustrate what they're up to.

You can see that there is a listing of people, an opportunity to connect with your Facebook account to see what your friends and colleagues think about something, and links through to Klout and Twitter. Moreover, the sidebar also includes (as appropriate) friend tagging, photo searching, and data from Q&A site Quora.

Finding 'Bing it on'

Oh dear, this is a bit embarassing. Earlier today I mentioned the 'Bing it on' search taste test resource that Microsoft has created to show everyone that Bing is better than Google. You can find it at http://www.bingiton.com/ which is a nice simple and easy to find URL. Of course, if you don't know this, you're going to have to find it, and the obvious place to start is going to be Bing - isn't it?

Umm, no. It's not. Do a search for bing it on, and you get a news item about it, a link to Bing the search engine, a link to the Wikipedia page, and so on. In fact, it's not even on the first page of results. Or the second. Or the third, fourth, fifth and I admit, I gave up at the sixth page of results. Hmmmm, what to do next? How about trying Google... Can we guess? Yes, it's the very first result.

Microsoft - it's stuff like that which is just plain embarassing. If you can't get your own links right, and we have to rely on the opposition to point us in the right direction, how are people ever going to believe you're serious?

Take the Bing versus Google Challenge.

Bing It On Remember the Coke V Pepsi wars? Bing has decided to go down the same route, and offer a blind 'search tasting' between them and Google. I don't actually think this is a very good idea, since if they lose the test, it'll just confirm to the player that they were right not to use Bing, and they'll firmly stay with Google. If they lose, they may consider switching engines, but I think it's a forlorn hope. And if Bing wins, and the player is a Bing user, they don't get anything other than confirmation. It also smacks a little bit of desperation as well I think.

Anyway, that's all beside the point. If you want to try the 'search tasting', go to 'Bing it on' (or 'Bing Bong, Microsoft calling' if you're old enough to remember the Avon ads) and you can type in 5 different searches, or use ones that they offer. You then get to see the results side by side and can choose left, right or a draw. At the end of the test, they'll give you the results. Of course, if you're a savvy searcher you'll be able to tell without any work which one is which due to the style of results and the emphasis, but try and put that on one side. Bing reckon that they win 2-1 with the small print saying "Based on a comparison of web search results pane only; excludes ads, Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph." To be honest, that's a hell of an exclusion, but still. I tried it and I decided one was an equal result, but the other four went to Google. Opppsy! Not quite what Bing was hoping for there.

I'd be really interested in seeing your results - which did you prefer, Bing or Google, and was it a close call or a walkover for one engine or the other. Please comment!

If you like the idea of blind search tasting there's a couple of other places that you can go. Take yourself to Blekko and run a search and include /monte after it - for example dog /monte and Blekko will present you with 3 choices - Blekko, Bing and Google. Do that a few times, and see which you prefer.

Alternatively try the Blind Search at Fejus, which gives you a choice of Yahoo, Bing and Google.

So.cl - Microsoft's new social network!

via www.so.cl

Well, just when you think the world of social networks cannot get any more insane, along comes Microsoft with a new one. I really do need to have a 'WTF?' category on the blog. This is available at  http://www.so.cl and they say of themselves: "So.cl is an experiment in open search. That means your searches on So.cl are viewable by other So.cl users and will also be available to third parties. So.cl does not automatically post your searches, comments, or likes to your Facebook stream unless you choose this option. Also, we don’t contact your Facebook friends unless you invite them."

The first thing that leapt out at me was this:

So... in order to use this new social network, I am expected to sign in by using.... another social network? (I can also sign in using my Windows Live account, but that's about as rusty and underused as a rusty and underused thing.) Unfortunately I can't yet tell you anything about it, since I'm on a waiting list, along with a lot of other people who I suspect simple want to wander around it and go 'uh?'

However, Danny has done a great job of dissembling it and his conclusion seems to be 'WTF? Uh?' with a side dish of 'use Bing instead!' I can't disagree with him on that.

Microsoft DID Try To Sell Bing To Facebook

There's an interesting little news snippet from Business Insider which is claiming that Microsoft may have tried to sell the Bing search engine to Facebook, with the possibility that this might still come off in the future. Microsoft is losing $2.5billion a year with the search engine and that's a huge amount of money, even in Microsoft terms. According to the article, investors are simply not that interested in search, when all it's doing is pulled Microsoft down when they should be concentrating on the Xbox, touch screen technology and software.

Facebook on the other hand is desperate for a proper search engine. They've already made moves into this area, and I recently noticed that the search box on Facebook now says 'Search for anything on Facebook'. That's a very interesting line - does it mean that users can search for anything that is contained within the Facebook world, or does it mean that while you're in Facebook, you can search for anything that you want to? I suspect this is no accident - while we're currently at the former stage, they want to move to the latter statement as quickly as possible.

All in all, another reason why information professionals need to get up to speed with Facebook - it's not about 'friends' any more.

Bing Social

Bing Social now with added recommendations. Or not, as the case may be. The idea is that because there are so many people out there using social networking resources it can be really hard to find the right people to follow. Bing Social Search is supposed to help with that by providing suggestions for people that you can follow, based on the searches that you run.

This works wonderfully well with their self promotional example of 'Windows phone' but I have to say that I found it difficult to find any other examples. Library, Librarian, Libraries all came up with nothing at all. 'Web 2.0' gave me one recommended user. "Search engines'' gave me nothing. Even 'Bing' didn't give me anything.

Cannot say that I'm impressed at all.

Bing changes interface

Bing is currently making some quite substantial changes to its interface. If you recall, when you ran a search all of the options for narrowing a search were down the left hand side of the screen. Well, they've now moved - or are in the process of moving to being below the search box. A search for hubble telescope results in the following:

This seems to be a sensible move, and really makes the most of the concept of Bing being a decision engine - providing you with appropriate links at appropriate times. Search for different subjects and you'll get different replies:

Now, that's all well and dandy, but there's a distinct lack of consistency. In the first instance we've got videos as the second option, and images as the last. With the musician we have images second and videos fourth. I'm not sure if this is because Bing suspects that we'd prefer to see still, soundless images of Lady Gaga rather her actually singing, but whatever the reason, the inconsistency is annoying. I also found that if I did searches for other bands I got links to songs and albums, so it's all a little slapdash I fear.

A third example, this time a health one gives us this:

As well as the other tabs (and surely there must be images and video that would be useful here?) we have a health tab, with content shared from the MayoClinic.

There are other examples, illustrated in the SearchEngineLand article which relate to finance among other subjects, but these are being rolled out slowly over the next few days, so you may not see them yet.

My bottom line is that it's a good idea, and I'm pleased to see Bing tweaking what they're about, but more consistency within the interface please.

Spindex - personalised searching

I've spent the morning playing around with the Tech Preview of a product called Spindex, which is currently in a closed trial - though you can contact them and ask access; it took a few weeks for my authorisation to come through. It's a Microsoft product, which uses Silverlight (if you don't have this on your machine you'll need to install it, which is a pain for those of you with closed systems). The idea is simple - you give Spindex access to your accounts on places such as Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and specific RSS feeds and Spindex will collate this information into a single searchable database. You can then update your status or more importantly, search for the information that you need.

Spindex shows you the data that you're searching for, but just from the resources that you've given to it, as well as a general search from Bing. As you'd expect being a Microsoft product, they're keen to promote their own resources.  Moreover, it tells me what is trending with my friends and colleagues, and what subtrends there are. You can then view the results, and share or remember them to your Evernote account as you go. As you interact with data in the main stream column the content in the right hand side changes to take account of what you're focussed on. You can also reply/favourite/Retweet or Like as appropriate depending on the origin of the content. This is what it looks like in action:

I have to say that I really like this. It's a great way to pull your content together (can we say Friendfeed?), but the integration is better, I like the search option, the ability to tweet/facebook from the interface and the Spindex ability to pull out stuff that it thinks is interesting - your own personal trending. It's far from being perfect - the idea of putting in RSS feeds by hand when I've got a perfectly good OPML file I could use is very irritating, and I'd like it to be able to automatically pull out photographs and videos in the way that something like JournoTwit can do, but it's early days, so I'm not going to be too harsh on it.

If you're concerned about information overload, this is a product that's headed in exactly the right direction. That it's from Microsoft is also interesting, and very pleasing. Maybe the company is finally coming to grips with this whole Internet thing?

Bottom line: This has the potential to be huge, if Microsoft manage it properly, integrate it better into a much larger range of products and add greater functionality. Certainly it's one to watch.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft unveils Spindex to enhance social networking (newstatesman.com)
• A Closer Look At Microsoft Spindex, An Experimental Social Aggregator (techcrunch.com)

Bing STILL censoring results

I thought we'd gone beyond this, but apparently not. When Bing first came out I did one of my usual searches - martin luther king - and I was curious about a little footnote at the bottom of the serps which simply said 'Some results have been removed'. I asked my Microsoft contacts, who all professed to have no knowledge of why this had happened, or which results had been removed. Microsoft do censor results in India - one of my favourite searches is a search for 'adult content' which results in the message "Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content." I'm not particularly happy with this, but it's not my country, there's nothing I can do about it, and at least I'm getting some indication as to what is being censored and why. So (back to the plot) I asked why material was being censored in the UK and why. No answer. Nada. Zip. Nothing.

A while later I ran the search again (interestingly Bing ranks a racist website as the #1 result, which is so wholly inappropriate it's beyond belief, but there you go) and the little message had gone, and the racist website was in the results. Fast forward to now - I was doing a search for 'noto55' which is a political term currently trending on Twitter. Lo and behold - the little footnote is back:

There's no real information on what results have been removed, why they've been removed, who chose to remove them - nothing. This is where things get interesting, because I got the same result on the American version, the Australian, Canadian, Dutch and New Zealand versions - 5 hits. However, with the Italian version, there were 203 hits. In theory, although in practice several of the pages that I looked at didn't have noto55, but variants such as noto, 55 and so on.

Now - why are there different results for Italy? Nothing appears to be particularly interesting in the Italian results - I wasn't suddenly faced by dubious images, so it's all a bit of a puzzle. And this leads me back to my original questions:

WHY is Microsoft censoring results?

WHAT are they censoring?

WHO wants results censored

WHY won't Microsoft tell us about this in any more detail other than a bland and totally inappropriate error type message?