David Jack Wange Olrik

Public transportation in Maps.app is so much nicer than Rejseplanen.

via tweetie

So Microsoft released a new search engine called Bing. Yes that’s right Bing, what an awesome name… or maybe not.

They named it Bing because they want people to make it in to a verb like “to google”, but I don’t see that happen any time soon – I certainly don’t want anybody “to bing” me.

But how does it compare to the competition? Well I tried to bing my self¹ today and these are the top 3 urls it returned:

1. http://olrik.dk/
2. http://search.cpan.org/~djo/
3. http://david.olrik.dk/sitemap.xml.gz²

Our family website, my Perl modules on CPAN and what? A gzipped XML sitemap, what am I going to do with that? I’m not a search engine!  – Not exactly what I had hoped for, especially that third link makes absolutely no sense at all. By comparison this is what Google gave me for the same search:

1. http://david.olrik.dk/
2. http://david.olrik.dk/2009/03/28/a-new-perspective-on-gtd/
3. http://twitter.com/davidolrik

Three links that are very relevant to the search for me. I know Bing is still in beta, but so is Google³ or at least they claim to be. As usual Microsoft is arriving too late in the game, but they do get some points for trying⁴. I went through the first 10 pages of results on Bing without finding a link to this site, and at least half of the results were not related to me in any way and that’s not an acceptable result for a search engine.

So am I going to be using Bing any time soon ? … Fugedabodit⁵!

1. No! – That really doesn’t sound right – People might actually be offended by it… [↩]
2. Note: I did not make this a clickable link, because unless you are a search engine it won’t make much sense to you [↩]
3. btw. Thank you Google for ruining peoples perception of what beta software means [↩]
4. Microsoft today, is way better than Microsoft 10 years ago [↩]
5. You need to use a bad Italian accent for this word to give meaning [↩]