In Google Versus Bing It Might Come Down to Trust

Everybody loves a good “David and Goliath” style battle, which is why it might seem like fun to root for Bing, a new search engine hoping to take some singificant market-share away from search-giant (TM?) Google.  That is until you realize that Bing is just Microsoft’s refresh of the failed LiveSearch. Then it is more like a Goliath versus Goliath battle in which rooting seems irrelevant.

While Microsoft claims that many people, while almost exclusively using Google for their search needs, are not always satisfied with the results.  This is where they see an opportunity to offer something better.

Early reports say that visually and even thematically Bing might really be on to something but the following comment fom PaidContent might just be the nail in the coffin for Bing:

But if I’m going to use one search engine more than another (i.e. make it the default in my browser), I want to be confident that I’m not missing out on results that I might find via another search engine. And after my week-long trial, I don’t have that confidence with Bing.

And that’s what everyone cares about in the end – not that their search is simple but that it is exhaustive.  Sure, any old search engine will give you movie times and trivia answers but when it comes to using a search engine for genuine research, whether for a school project or a honeymoon getaway, users want to be confident that they are not missing out.

As long as Google returns a more exhaustive set of results than their competitors they will remain securely atop the search standings.

“The Google Bay” Shows Google Just Another Pirate Bay

Following last week’s guilty verdict against the four founders of The Pirate Bay, many have been wondering what makes TPB all that different from any other search engine. Like, say Google?

Well, someone has built a simple site that uses only Google to provide anyone interested with links to torrents ready for download.

I tried it out myself and here are the first few results for a search for “Wolverine”

Not only doesn’t The Pirate Bay come up in the first few hits, but shows just how many sites do exactly what The Pirate Bay does – and Google does it better.

While it is clear that P2P sharing of copyrighted works is a challenge it doesn’t seem like anyone will be successful in suing it out of existence.  Time for a new plan, gang.

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Ask.com TV Ad Crawls… What Took So Long

AdAge is reporting on a new advertising effort from search engine also-ran Ask.com:

In an effort certain to raise eyebrows, search engine Ask.com just started an ad campaign that relies mostly on “crawls” that show up in the lower part of the screen during selected cable programs. While the marketer will still run traditional commercials, it also hopes to capture attention by posing questions to viewers at the bottom of the screen about the very subject matter they are watching at the moment. To get the answer, those watching will need to surf to the company’s search site.

Considering that two of the more popular TV networks, ESPN and CNN, have had crawls forever, I am surprised that we haven’t seen much more of this type of advertising.  In the face of ad-skipping technology it makes perfect sense to embed the ad right into the programming.  The question will be whether or not it turns off viewers but I am willing to bet that it will not.  Viewers intrinsically get that someone has to pay for the programming and if it isn’t going to be them via subscription then it has to be advertisers and if we’re going to skip over traditional ads we will have to put up with an alternative.

Truth is, these ads don’t seem to be all that intrusive and no more distracting than a news or sports crawl.

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Cuil Fails At Naming Itself. Preview of their Future Failure.

There is an overwhelming amount of press today about the new search engine cuil.com.

So far, I have learned that is was started by ex-Googlers and that it is pronouced “cool.”

Yes, nearly everyone is saying there is no way they can beat Google or even come close to competing in the search market for all sorts of technical reasons but I have yet to see anyone come right out and tell it like it is:

It will fail because nobody can pronounce it.  And when you finally learn how they would like you to pronouce their madeup word you feel like punching them in the face.

I never liked the whole “drop a vowel” school of web 2.0 site naming (fickr, et. al.) but this whole make up a word and make it sound like a word we already have is truly ridiculous.

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