RSSWhat's in a name, Bing haters?
By Angela Gunn | Published June 5, 2009, 6:27 PM
This episode of Recovery is brought to you by Keyboard Cat. Because this week needs played off something fierce.
The responses are in, Scott's wrung the votes out of the staff, and you all know at last the three names dubbed Better Than Bing. (Confidential to csurfer: I do love a math joke; confidential to arq_carlos1, if we had gold stars for individual editors' favorites you'd get mine.) And now that we've got that out of the way, might I ask you people what you'd rename Yahoo and Google?
Because honestly, after expecting that Microsoft would name the thing Kumo, I feared for the fate of the charming search engine I saw displayed all those months ago at Microsoft Research Day. "Kumo," however clever, would have hamstrung a nifty set of fresh search ideas with a moniker that sounded like a Stephen King monster.
"Bing," though, hits all the right notes for consumer-adoption purposes: it's fun to say, it's short, it's a familiar sort-of-word but nothing too fraught with meaning (or trademark issues), and you can spell this one. It evokes things most of us like, like Bing Crosby's voice and the strip club in The Sopranos (you got a problem with that?). And it's not too-clever-by-half, which... hey, remember cuil?
Cuil.com launched last year and I'm willing to bet you haven't been back since. I'm no longer sure how to pronounce it; as for typing, you know I'm not exactly Mavis Staples over here but so far I've spelled it wrong twice ("ciul," which takes you to a placeholder page, and "culo," which takes you somewhere very else). The choice was so perverse that a friend of the site actually built a Squidoo page to try to get people re-routed to the right spelling. It was so perverse that to write this paragraph, I ended up searching for the site on Google. Enough fail for you?
So let the hills ring with "Bing." It's hard to tell at first in a company town, and we're all neck-deep in the $100 million ad blitz right now. In fact, StatCounter numbers suggest that Bing is currently the second most-used search engine, though at this hour Market Share has them with a 6% US share behind Yahoo's 8% and Google's 57.4% -- wild times, in other words. If in a month Microsoft's search share is off by half or so, we can review the name choice in the well-appointed conference room inside your head.
And in the meantime, think back to the first times you heard "yahoo" (isn't that a word for "hick?") and "google" (STOP SPELLING IT WRONG! -- an even funnier reaction when you remember it's a made-up word twice over, by the way). Did you foresee market domination, or did you just have fun saying it and remember the name next time you needed to look something up?
In related news, I have also learned from this experience that no one still remembers the Name That Tune "I can name that tune in four notes or less" game, which makes me sad. And once again, Keyboard Cat approaches the Mighty Wurlitzer (another reference lost to the digerati)...
Let your geek flag fly and have a great weekend.
What's in a name ? Try GHQ.com, simple name, simple search.
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|First, I'd like to address Cuil or whatever it's name is :p I really gave it a go, a chance to win me over, but it failed in epic proportions for me. First and foremost were the results returned in my searches. Most, if not all returns were duplicates. Lastly was relevance, which was poor. I really tried to like it, but ended up hating it.
A few days back I did a search using both Google and Bing. Results for me were pretty much equal to each other... Not that they both returned the same exact hits, but that they both returned the same mix and match of relevant and irrelevant results. Of course both did offer many of the same returns as well, but at least they were not cloning each other.
Of course, those in the loop share a distrust for online services from MS (or any MS products). So for me personally, Bing does not present a value greater than Google. Google remains king of the search hill in my book for now.
Speaking of Yahoo.... I actually do still use Yahoo as a secondary search. Many times when I can't find what I'm looking for, I'll hit up Yahoo next which returns results not always found by Google. Likely due to Google's rankings structure.
Does anyone remember AltaVista? .... Wow, I just checked and it's still available! LOL
Oh yeah, and Angela, will you marry me? Hmmm, wait, nvm, my wife would likely not be happy about that. I would be happy of course, but I think she might resent it. Oh well, turn off the delusional machine and back to reality now.
Back on topic before Angela bans me from here.... I think MS took a right turn this time with Bing. I think Bing will likely become the second most widely used search and make Google sweat some this time. It may even become possible for MS to overcome the behemoth known as Google by leveraging it's vast fortunes and marketing pool. If it's one thing MS did right, it's marketing. Though it seems they have neglected their marketing for the Zune... Guess it's just not a priority right now.
BTW, "Name that Tune" totally ruled back in the day... Loved it, right along with "Star Trek", "The Brady Bunch", "The Partridge Family" and "Gilligan's Island"... Ok, and "The Price is Right" and "Hollywood Squares".
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|Funny you should mention altavista as I still use that one and Google as my back-up. Old habits die hard but Alta vista allows you to do a little more tweaking on multi-word searches whcih cuts down on all the non-relevant junk the other engines bring up.
In the end, everyone has their own preferences and what works for one may not work for another.
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|Why is there so much emotion (positive and negative) when a news story focuses on Microsoft? Let's stick with the facts and how they might or might not impact us. In what ways is Bing better or worse than Google or Yahoo? How will (or should) Bing's introduction affect marketers? Here are my newest thoughts on Bing, Yahoo!, and Google.
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|Uh...
Have you paid *any* attention to the 5 or so articles comparing Bing to Google on this site?
I believe that may be what you are looking for. :)
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|Laughing. Pc? I was thinking the same thing and was going to post on it but then I thought you would do it the justice it deserved and failed ye not:)
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|Fair test: I've got a problem with my truck so I searched "honda ridgeline noc sensor wire" The first hit on bing was a keyword loaded porn spam comment on a completely unrelated forum. The second hit was a photo of towel twisted to look like a roaster chicken. Google results were just as useful, but not as amusing. No winners.
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|Hahaha, now there's an excellent test of both systems. To me it seems Bing (now officially pronounced byng) won that one.
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|"(now officially pronounced byng)"
roflmao...
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|I saw the commercial on television for it... I found it disturbing. Maybe I just don't like the idea of MS deciding what I should be looking at. I just don't trust them not to monkey with the results to placate their advertisers. MS is all about the money (not the lulz). But maybe that is unnatural, what needs to be examined, is my trust in Google.
The commercial is a brilliant piece of work. I just bristle at it's subtle message to throw off my Orwellian fears.
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|i never liked "name that tune", although i remember it well.
as far as the winning "titles", i think they were humorous at best.
however, i think it can safely be said that there is little elegance in four letter words.
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|i actually liked "Name that Tune" and as far as four letter words, when you hear Mz Boyle drop the f word twice in one day in good old England, you gotta love her just for that and her voice.:)
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|Regarding Cuil, you bet wrong. I have been back and I find Cuil to be a much more interesting and better search engine than what I have seen from Bing thus far. What Cuil lacks is a big media budget and the power of Microsoft to bludgeon competition with dollars. I pointed out in a response to an article in the Media Post that the claims that search results are time consuming to find and unsatisfactory in results has much more to do with high schools and colleges not teaching search technique to students and little to do with specific search engine design.
Quoting:
While Bing may have a point about search time and dissatisfaction with search results, the problem is not going to be in the least solved by Bing. The real problem is that virtually nowhere in K-12 or college curriculum is learning effective searching tools and techniques taught for most high school or college graduates. If advanced Google search techniques are used and Google's specialized databases like Scholar, Government, Books and News Archive are used, one can find very valuable on point information very quickly and my discussion group and library subject guides are literally filled with examples. Furthermore, most people in the United States are blissfully unaware of state funded access 24/7 to public library card holders of a range of databases from services like First Search, EBSCOHost, ProQuest and others that provide access to source listings and full text articles from magazines, newspapers and academic journals. The problem is not getting a Bing to ping Google, it is rather teaching Americans of all ages information literacy skills and in particular a much higher level of skill in using search engines and also databases that are more powerful but a learning curve over search engines.
Meet the Googles
http://www.google.com/se...meet+the+googles%22+and+ %22net-gold%22&hl=en&rls=DAUS,DAUS:2006-11,DAUS:en&filter=0
A shorter URL for the above link:
http://tinyurl.com/52t9hj
Database and Internet Search Tools and Techniques
http://www.google.com/se...ld%22+and+%22temple.edu% 22+and+(%22information+literacy%22+OR+databases+OR+database+OR+% 22internet+search%22+OR+%22searching+techniques%22)&hl=en&rlz= 1T4DAUS_enUS314US314&filter=0
A shorter URL for the above link:
http://tinyurl.com/r5qr34
Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jwne@temple.edu
http://daviddillard.businesscard2.com
Net-Gold
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/net-gold
http://net-gold.jiglu.com/
General Internet & Print Resources
http://guides.temple.edu/general-internet
COUNTRIES
http://guides.temple.edu/general-country-info
EMPLOYMENT
http://guides.temple.edu/EMPLOYMENT
TOURISM
http://guides.temple.edu/tourism
DISABILITIES
http://guides.temple.edu/DISABILITIES
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|"has much more to do with high schools and colleges not teaching search technique to students and little to do with specific search engine design."
Wow.
Popular culture does not require specific training.
Ask yourself who these search engines target to get the most bang for their advertising dollar. Now can you explain to the class why "Cuil" is failing at that?
It may be great for academia; and there's no problem with that. However, it is of no comparison to the popular search engines if that is to be it's main (or only) use...
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|Kumo would have made a little sense if it's meant to be Japanese for cloud, as things are going skyward lately. Bing just seems as irritating as the rest of the current search engine names.
How about TheSearch.com or something a bit more to the point?
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|I think what stops me from liking it is the inherent American accent that comes with the name bing exactly due to the reasons you outlined in your article. It's irritating. And god help us, if it catches on it will be *really* irritating. There's already been 6/7 articles on here about it and I'm starting to be sick of it.
Google is a very European sounding word, or at least it can be pronounced so; bing can't which to me alienates that audience.
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|Just annoy everyone else by pronouncing it, "Byng". ;)
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|"I have also learned from this experience that no one still remembers the Name That Tune "I can name that tune in four notes or less" game, which makes me sad."
We remember, we just skimmed that part. ;)
..and once we realized, well...it was a little too late. :p
And of course, I had to read this article *after* work, so our proxy did *nothing* to prevent "culo" from displaying in all it's glory... At least the kids were out playing. Damn my curiosity.
Wonder what would happen if you typed that into Bing video search.... ;) (Don't do it. Trust me on this. Just say "No.")
BTW: *LOVE* The Keyboard Cat. Too funny. The original literally had me in tears....
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|"Bing motherf**ker, do you use it?" Sounds kinda funny :D
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