For a supposed technology company, Microsoft sure fails to compete technologically when it comes to search. Instead of actually building a better search engine, they’re bribing newspapers in a feeble attempt to hurt a rival search engine. [Read more…]
Bing Colludes with Newspapers
Unable to compete with Google in terms of search quality, Microsoft Bing continues to try and buy its way into the search game. On the user side, they’ve got their Cashback program. Now, on the publisher side, they’re offering newspapers “premium placement” in their search results, in exchange for blocking Google with a proprietary extension to the robots.txt protocol (whose development will also be funded by Microsoft).
This is cross-industry anticompetitive collusion at its finest. Instead of revolutionizing the media landscape with better search, Bing seeks to prop up dying old media through biased search. Amazing how Microsoft is willing to break their own search engine just to satisfy their vendetta against Google.
Wonder how the Bing development team feels about this. All their efforts to create a better search product are now being tossed aside to give dead tree media a handjob.
The question now is this: will people fall for Bing’s broken biased search, or will they continue to google what really matters to them in an ocean of infinite media choice?
Is Google trying to maintain its position in the British psyche?
Perhaps you’ll forgive this thought dump as I make a few personal observations about Google and its place in Britain.
Maybe you have your own thoughts about how Google is trying (officially or otherwise) to maintain its position as premier search engine.
Recently I’ve noticed a trend on TV ads where, instead of providing a direct web address, they invite the viewer to “search online for…”. However, they don’t specify which search engine you should use — merely that you should go online.
Obviously, this approach means that they’re fairly confident that the proposed search term will bring up their website. I wonder if they’re also assuming that most people will use Google?
Last week I saw for the first time a direct ad for Google. At the end of an advert for a pet insurance company, a Google page appeared on screen with the voiceover “Search on Google for Pet Plan”. [Read more…]
Would Microsoft rather screw Google than improve itself?
Keeping an eye on the competition is one thing, but when you read about a company explicitly holding meetings designed to make another look bad you have to wonder where its priorities lie.
(Not so) secret “Screw Google” meetings have been a weekly affair at Microsoft, it seems, with the Redmond giant keen to find ways of making a major search rival look bad.
Now, we don’t know whether other companies are holding similar sorts of meetings — I’m sure some are — but in my mind it makes a lot more sense to focus on developing decent products of your own than wasting time trying to bring down the “enemy”. [Read more…]
Microsoft censors Bing results, one more episode of Microhoo fail
901am has reported on a regular base about the shortcomings in the Microhoo era and we can now add one more to the list: PCWorld scooped that when searching on Bing for Why is Windows so expensive the new engine returns as first results Why are Macs so expensive.
Surprisingly this result comes from Yahoo Answers. Is the future of Bing a massive Yahoo! SEO campaign?
