Posts Tagged ‘google’

Google Maps Street View Car Spotting in Sioux Falls

I had a little bit of excitement on my way to work this morning. I was driving down I-29 here in Sioux Falls and spotted a car with a very large pole sticking up. When I got near it, I noticed it had California license plates with a monitor mounted in the passenger seat with enough antennas and wires to make any nerd jealous. I really didn’t think it could be a Google Maps car, but I quick got my camera out and took a picture just in case. When I got to the office we ‘Googled’ Google Maps cars and found out that that is exactly what it was.

google-maps-car

Now my whole day is going to be ruined with constant refreshes of Google Maps of Sioux Falls to see if their Street View is available..

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Jun 17th, 2009

If Search Is Broken, How Has Bing Fixed It?

I really don’t mean to be one of those nay-saying Microsoft haters. Really, I don’t. But I’m still looking for that feature that Bing offers me that Google doesn’t (except of course for the cool images on the homepage). Is it the shopping? I think not. My new wife and I recently purchased a Samsung plasma tv. I decided to take Bing for a test run to see if it helped me make the decision.

First, I did a search in Google’s shopping section. We decided on the Samsung PN50A550. The model has been discontinued and the price was right at a local shop here in town. What I found was actually a bit surprising. My search on Google returned a nice little price range as well as some reviews, some technical specs, and some other related items I might be interested in.
samsung-a550-google

And Bing? Well.. it returns nothing. That’s right, I was brought to a page with two HDMI cables. No prices, no reviews, nothing.
samsung-a550-bing

Well, since my tv shopping resulted in a complete failure, I decided to check out the travel feature. Like I said earlier, I have a new wife and we just got back from our honeymoon just a few weeks ago. We decided to go to Daytona Beach. Bing hadn’t been launched yet when we were planning the trip, but I decided to go to Bing to see what the hotel selection was like.

Bing’s hotel selection was actually pretty good when going through the travel section of Bing’s site. It let me pick which features I was looking for and found the best prices. It acted much like any big travel site that you’d find around the web — pick your dates and location and it spits out the best prices. What was interesting to me was that typing “daytona beach hotels” into the search bar didn’t bring up the same interface. In fact, I couldn’t distinguish their search results from Google’s except that Google showed the suggested similar search terms at the bottom except on the top like Bing. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the cheapest hotel, so it was a great feature that I could select the features that I needed on the side.

So how did Bing work for me? Well, in shopping for my tv, it was a complete and utter failure. Google clearly took the upper hand since.. well it returned results. For the hotels, Bing clearly dominated Google – as long as I knew where to go in the interface (except, one could argue that if I knew where to go in the first place I wouldn’t need to search). In my case, Bing really was a fancy new interface for a travel site like Travelocity or some other similar site. Even then, it was an improvement. But is Bing really fixing search? I would argue not. It’s an improvement on shopping, probably. A fix for search? Well I’m not so sure it’s broken, but I honestly can’t see a difference except for the interface is slightly rearranged.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 16th, 2009

Is Microsoft Against the Same Thing Linux Is Against in the Desktop Market?

Microsoft’s new interface to Live Search, called Bing, seems to be taking off nicely for them. Their ad campaign has created quite a stir and they snagged a pretty good chunk of the search market share within the first few days of its launch. Computerworld reports that Bing accounted for roughly 16% of the search market share in the U.S. with Google accounting for 71% and Yahoo coming in with 10%. Globally, Google controls a much larger share of the market space with over 87% with both Microsoft and Yahoo bringing in barely over 5%.

The question is, can Bing hold up in the long run? Microsoft has been pouring money into advertising and creating hype around Bing so the launch better show some serious results. We’ve already seen an amount of money that Microsoft is willing to throw at the search market in its $40 billion offer to buyout Yahoo!, so I’m sure that this barrage on Google will keep up for a long time, but how much of the search activity is real and how much is because Bing is new? Personally, I used Bing for a day or two while it was new to see what it was like. However, except for the search suggestions at the side, Bing really had nothing to offer me and I went back to Google.

Just like Linux distributions trying to get into the desktop market, users tend to stick with what they are comfortable with. Yes, I’m a Linux fan and do think that Linux offers a superior product. I don’t necessarily think that this is the same case for Bing in the search market, but this is a problem that Bing is going to face. After trying out Bing and finding that it wasn’t as drastically different than Microsoft said it was going to be, I went back. Why? Because I’m comfortable with Google. I like Google’s interface better. Does Google have a better product? Perhaps. Just like when people hear ‘PC’ they think ‘Windows’, when people hear ‘search’ they think ‘Google’.

Of course, only time will tell but I wouldn’t expect to see this influx of market share for long for Bing. It’s going to be a long road to success for Microsoft if they want to take the search market. For now we can expect big things as its Ballmer’s pet project and seems to have a nearly infinite amount of resources. As time goes on, Bing will need to be able to sustain itself to be a viable product so Microsoft can devote those resources to R&D to add value to the user experience rather than using it to create hype.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jun 9th, 2009

The Onion Reports Accurate Analysis of Bing..

The Onion was trying to make fun of Microsoft’s new Bing service and hit the nail on the head.. Of course the third reaction was completely ridiculous, but they got it right with the first “opinion quotes”. The first one reads:

“Bing? Interesting. I’ll have to Google that when I get home.”

Hehe that’s exactly right. They can’t take down Google for search when it’s a household word the way it is now. Time will tell, but I can’t imagine any market share going to Microsoft for quite a while (of course excluding a short burst of traffic from the launch).

The second opinion reads:

“Finally a search engine for the Zune age!”

So true.. Microsoft has done a great job with market penetration with Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. With iPods and Google.. er, media players and search engines? Exactly.

It’s only funny because it’s true.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Jun 4th, 2009

Asus Embarrassed by Linux Netbook?

At the Computex trade show, Qualcomm showed off an Asus Eee running Google’s Android OS. We’ve been hearing about Android as a possibility on netbooks for a while now, but haven’t seen a vendor who’s done it until now. Asus should be proud. Instead, Asus chairman Jonney Shih has apologized for the showing, saying:

“Frankly speaking … I would like to apologize that, if you look at Asus booth, we’ve decided not to display this product. I think you may have seen the devices on Qualcomm’s booth but actually, I think this is a company decision so far we would not like to show this device. That’s what I can tell you so far. I would like to apologize for that.”

Why is Asus so scared of showing off a netbook with Android as its base? I’m guessing Microsoft has something to do with it.

So far Linux has been met with very little success on the netbook — just like the desktop. This should be expected as netbooks are suppsed to be just a smaller version of laptops and I would expect that people would prefer the same operating system on both. Why should Microsoft be stiff-arming Asus like this? In a word: Google. Microsoft hasn’t had to play catch up to anyone for nearly as long as they’ve been chasing Google. Obviously, Google has a long ways to go (in fact, they have hardly gone anywhere so far), but Microsoft appears to be a bit nervous and trying to keep its friends in close check.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 3rd, 2009

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