Feb. 13th, 2011

Bing

Feb. 13th, 2011 06:46 pm
Dear "Bing" search engine:

One of your commercials concerns the problem of internet searches giving you too much information that doesn't help you. For making the decision of what brand of salsa to buy at the grocery store, you suggest typing "salsa" into your search engine in Shopping mode. I tried this, and all the results on the first page you showed me were for music, and under your "Category" menu only the fifth option was even related to food (following "Sports & Outdoors").

Another of your commercials features Bing making it a lot harder for a guy to ask someone out by, I dunno, giving him too much information that doesn't help him. To help with the date, you suggest typing "powder blue tuxedo" into your search engine. I tried this, and the first three results (in shopping mode) were for t-shirts. The fifth was for a movie featuring a character who wears a powder blue tuxedo, as described in the extended summary that I had to click through two links to find so that I could understand why you were showing me that result in the first place.

For comparison, I tried the same searches in Google (in shopping mode). "Salsa" gave me real salsa of the kind you put on your food, plus one bike frameset from a company called Salsa but to be fair that was result #8. "Powder blue tuxedo," similarly, did not offer a t-shirt until result #8: the first seven were real (components of) powder blue tuxedos. The movie simply did not appear in the lists.

Dear Bing, I'm sure you have your uses. But if you're going to suggest a specific search in a commercial to be viewed by countless potential users, would it kill you to try out that same search and make sure it'll actually give people helpful results?

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violetclm

February 2011

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