The Microsoft Bing meeting

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I (along with Karen Blakeman and 10 other worthies) were invited to spend an evening with the UK Microsoft people to talk about Bing. You can follow up on the meeting by searching Twitter for #meetbing or just clicking the link. I've now had a chance to settle down again, and this is my take on the evening.

The Microsoft people are really nice; and give them lots of good karma for arranging the evening, and being prepared to listen to people. This isn't the first time that they've done this - back when they were launching their first iteration of a search engine I was one of the 'search champs' they invited across to Redmond to spend a couple of days looking at the offering. This was a rather smaller gathering and was supposed to be 2 hours instead. It's really excellent to see a search engine company/resource being that open, and it's a lot more than most of the others have been. They're also a very patience, good humoured and resiliant bunch - if I'd been them I'd have thrown me out in the first ten minutes I think. All told therefore I liked *the people* a lot. If you're actually from Microsoft though I suggest you stop reading here because this is about as good as it gets for you.

We were supposed to have a 20 minute ppt overview, break and demonstration. That went out of the window very quickly - 90 minutes in we were still on the 3rd slide. I don't think that they had anticipated the interest or number of questions that we all wanted to ask, and we quickly left the plan behind and just went into a Q&A session. I'd like to be able to point you to the slides, but Microsoft don't appear to be doing the Web 2.0 thing and they've not put their slides online anywhere, which is disappointing. Most of the statistics they used they had collected themselves via their own toolbar, which to be honest isn't any use to anyone, due to the intrinsic bias contained in that.

The key points that came out of the evening for me were:
Microsoft know that they're behind the game and are playing catchup. There was a lot of talk of a '10 year plan' which worried me; the impression that I got was that while they were in search for the long haul it really is the *long* element that they're looking at.

They want to be different from Google, but not too different, because that might scare people away. They apparently considered more graphical user interfaces, but decided not to take the risk. It seems that they're going to be happy to just raise the awareness of the product at the moment, and hope to leech a few users away from Google. Quite frankly I don't really see how this is going to work - if you like Google, that's what you're going to use. If you don't like Google you're going to be looking for a real alternative, and a Google clone with a few bells and whistles isn't going to cut it.

Their key market is the home user, rather than business. They're emphasising the ability to compare prices, doing searches for flights and so on, hence the vertical markets they're looking at. They also want to make a bit of money as well, which is reasonable.

I expressed disappointment that they're not being more radical and innovative - I seem to recall using the term 'woeful' to describe some of the things that they're doing, if for no other reason than almost every single one of them is already being done. This comes back to the 'being cautious' thing, which for me just screams out that as a company they're running scared and simply don't know how to innovate in search, and are just playing catchup.

I asked about the Microsoft censorship of UK results (the Martin Luther King search that I've previously blogged about) and they had no answer, but I'm promised one. They also didn't have much to say when I asked them about the blanket ban on searching for 'sex' in the Indian version. I also did some more searches at the same time 'penis' is a banned term, but 'vagina' isn't - so work that out! Also, as Karen pointed out, the video search option isn't censored. Now, in and of itself I don't really care that much about what Microsoft doing in the Indian market, and it's the choice that country to decide what they allow to be searched I guess, and I'm not really going to have too much of a go at Microsoft for bowing to local pressure. However, what does worry me is that they've just 'banned' the use of certain words in returning results. Just about every other search engine is capable of working out what's a pornographic site and what isn't, but clearly Microsoft has issues here. Coupled with the inconsistencies makes me doubt the ability of their team to pull together something that works properly. They also simply do not appear to have considered that the mouseover video starts playing makes the engine a porn lovers paradise, and I gently broke it to them that as a result Bing has already been banned in at least one educational grid for learning, and probably more. Yes, I know that they've added in the ability to block the specific domain that provides the porn, but do they really expect the average parent to understand what to do? I also expect that most IT departments will find it just as quick and easy to block Bing, never mind any specific subdomain. They just don't seem to have thought this through at all.

Karen, myself and several others expressed the concern that the functionality wasn't impressive. They've reduced functionality from Live (where's the link: command!) and they used to have a nice little slider option in MSN Search. That was at least innovative and interesting, but it's obviously too innovative since it's been dropped. We also said that we weren't happy that the advanced search option wasn't on the opening screen, and that a lot of functionality was command line driven, and difficult to find. This all got scribbled down as useful feedback.

Good news for the UK market - they seem to be going to roll stuff out to us next. We never did actually find out why we were starting out with less functionality that the US version, but there you go. I also understand that we're going to be getting UK images as background wallpaper but to be honest, that is almost literally papering over the cracks.

We did end up with a brief demonstration, but unfortunately that was of features that are currently only available in the US version, so the suggested 'good searches' of San Francisco and flight ticketing really was wholly inappropriate. Either don't show these, choose UK examples or wait until the functionality is rolled out here.

I think the Microsoft folks should have done more work on the group they chose. Clearly we all use search engines and were already familiar with basic search concepts, so they could have started at a higher level. 2 hours simply wasn't enough time, and I don't think the demonstration model they chose was appropriate. Microsoft - if you're going to do it, do it properly! One annoying sad little niggle, which I'm almost loathed to bring up - with all the travelling that was a good 7 hours out of my life, and I know that others came further. I'm happy to do that, because it's interesting, but ultimately it's in Microsoft's best interests, and our suggestions are (hopefully) going to help them improve their product. An offer to pay for travel expenses would have been appreciated, and the offer of Bing pens, notepads, cheap canvas bags and a 'Bing pong' table game was quite frankly insulting.  Just another example that they're not thinking things through!

My overall impression is, as D Stuart said "On train home from meeting Bing...thoroughly nice chaps, not a chance in hell of beating Google" and I'd echo Karen's tweet "Would love them to have a fighting chance against Google but can't see it happening at present." I'll be really interested to see if anything comes of the meeting, but I have my doubts. 

[Edited to add: I've now had an email with a request for expense details.]

Comments

[David]

Why is it we only consult for the biggest companies and the smallest companies for free? Thank God for medium-sized companies.

In defense of Bing - Whilst they didn't necessarily mention paying for travel, they did say they would when I asked, so I hope you kept the receipt

[Phil Leggetter]

Nice post Phil. I think you've listed all the key points that came out of yesterday.

I think you came up with some very constructive points yesterday that Microsoft should definitely do something about and continue listening to your opinion.

Since this was the first of these types of meetings, and I hope there are more, I would have liked people to be a bit more positive about what Microsoft have done and are trying to do. They have successfully rebranded Live to Bing. By doing so they have managed to gain a bit of traction (3% of the search market) and people are becoming aware of the rich search functionality that Bing has such as the Video search with play-on-rollover and a better image search experience. You made a good point that this was already in Live search but people just weren't aware of it. More people are now.

You also highlighted a few things you liked such as the AJAX-powered site content preview you can get of a page to allow people to make a more informed decision before actually clicking a link.

The main thing for me is that we need competition in this area. Google have forced Microsoft to try harder in areas they previously took for granted such as the web browser and office productivity (email, word processing, spreadsheets). Maybe Microsoft will be able to push Google into being more innovative in order to keep their large share of the market. Time will tell and, as you note above, Microsoft are in it for the *long* haul.

[Web Hosting Review]

One great thing about Bing is using it for shopping... Search the term wii in Bing. Notice at the top there will be a sponsored link for a percent off anything on eBay. Just follow the link.