Bing vs. Google

I switched my default search engine to Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, about a week ago. I'm used to finding pertinent results to most of my searches with google in the first page and usually the first few links. So my rule for Bing was, if it's not on the first page I'd go to Google and see how it worked there. I just wanted to give a quick report of my experience so far.

For the most part Bing seems to do just fine. I haven't really seen any advantage to it over Google but the rumor is it's supposed to be better for media and perhaps a few other things. I'd say 1 out of every 5 queries I do on Bing I'm not satisfied with the results and so I try Google. Out of those 1/5 I'd say Google gives me what I'm looking for about 2/3 of the time. These are very rough numbers of course, completely off the cuff, but for now it's the best I can do.

Here are a few samples from those 20% that Bing didn't do the job for me (They are pulled out of my twitter so keep that context in mind):

Google beats bing for map search of "rattlesnake creek, covelo, ca". Google nailed it. Bing didn't get close.

RT @pmdorn: @mmadink I crashed Bing! I searched for Google! LOL

Google wins Bing for "add twitter to blogger"

google beats bing for the query "What is a twibe"

And here's a few to give Bing a bit of a moral boost:

Bing did the job for "What is JEE"

Bing beat Google for "google app engine manager". Pretty funny that Bing did a better job then Google for Google's own product.

I've been playing around with Google's web development tools (very cool by the way) and I couldn't find the home page for their App manager. Google would NOT give it to me. Gave Bing a try and it got it on the first page. That's a good example of why competition is good. I love Google but everyone needs some good healthy competition to keep them honest.

So at this point I think it's actually up in the air as to which is actually better. Google obviously has a leg up but Bing is brand spanking new and with that in mind I'm pretty impressed with it. I haven't changed me default search engine back to Google yet either. I will as soon as Bing starts to slow me down.

User Interfaces

There is a blog here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4467 that discuses users moving from Windows XP, the primary windows user base, to Windows 7. As with almost anything that discuses Windows where user comments are allowed a flame war started. Normally I just skip over these but I found the subject of this one very intriguing; Microsoft and it's constant changing of the user interfaces (UIs), good or bad?

Some very interesting points were actually made in between the insults being thrown back and forth and I'll try to present both sides of the argument.

Side A; Unless there is some ground-breaking change to a UI that will add significant advantages over the current one, it shouldn't be changed at all due to the cost and trouble of users having to relearn how to do things (like open a file). Most users are just trying to get their job done and using a computer is a means to that end, nothing more. Unless there is a better way to do their job they shouldn't have to relearn how to do it. Period.

Side B; Technology changes and interfaces change with them. Users should expect to have to familiarize themselves with a new UI for a piece of technology in the same way they would have to, and be expected to, familiarize themselves with new controls for a vehicle. Say going from a '70 Chevy to a '09 Prius. It's also likely that the UI hasn't changed much unless there really is new functionality that the old interface wouldn't support. It really probably just looks a bit different and once you look past the new colors and graphics you'll see it's mostly the same.

My Take; I'm not agreeing and disagreeing with either of them. I definitely think changing the UI for no good reason is really annoying and I myself get irritated every time I find something that I used to know right where it was has moved. On the other hand I'm a developer and I actually have to make the call to change the UI at times. I've experienced first hand the ridiculous lash-backs from users about having to learn a new interface that I know is better. I've also seen first hand that it's only a few users that really seem to have a problem. Out of my 2500 users of this small application that I drastically changed the interface on (because the old one wouldn't support new features) I had about ten users call and complain. Out of those ten, one called back repeatedly and accounted for about 98% of the complaints.

So what's the point of this post if I'm not going to take a side? It's just to ask people to be aware that UIs do have to change sometimes to move things along. This isn't always the case and users have a right to be annoyed when they get changes for PR purposes but before you flame your developers please take a few extra seconds to see if there really is some benefit to the annoying new UI.

VS 2003 Server Extension Snafu

Recently I started to convert a virtual terminal server to a development machine so I don't have to worry about my machine dieing on me, leaving me unable to work while it is getting fixed.  Believe it or not I've been through three machines in the last 2 years.  I swear it's not my fault.  My cube is cursed.  Anyway that is why I'm off loading my development environments to a virtual server. 

One of my jobs at work is maintaining a whole bunch of ASP.Net 1.1 projects.  Unfortunately, after installing Visual Studio 2003 it would not open any of the ASP projects.  It would always give the error, "cannot find the components for communicating with the frontpage server extensions".  It wouldn't even let me make a new one but that was helpful since I new it had to be something with the server and/or the install.  I fiddled with it for a few hours then gave up since I could still open and work on them locally.  Then after a few weeks I asked another more experienced guy to look at the problem.  He couldn't get it either.  I finally found the solution here:

http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/archive/2004/04/23/WebProjects.aspx

which basically says; Run msiexec.exe /x {17B66E83-1BC9-11D5-A54A-0090278A1BB8}
Then reinstall the prerequisites. 

It worked.  Thank God.  What a pain.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Yahoo has a new CEO

Yahoo's new CEO tried to rally the troops around her new management structure. Here's the full text of her memo to staff.

View Original Article

Yahoo who?  Alright I admit I know who Yahoo! is but to be honest they went from my homepage, primary email and secondary search engine to a company that I forget exists sometimes in less then a year.  That whole fiasco with Microsoft last year really killed them IMHO.  Bartz, Yahoo!'s new CEO, really has her work cut out for her to try and turn things around. 

Oh and as an aside, Flock makes it seductivly easy to blog about stuff.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Flock: A New Browser

Not only is this blog about Flock but I'm using Flock's blog editor to type it.  My very first impressions of it were not terribly great.  I installed it on my main computer which has a 19'' screen and my first thought was "cluttered".

I'm sure the main reason for this is that I've been using Google's Chrome browser as my primary browser for the past few months.  Chrome is all about keeping things simple and it really does a great job.  The two coolest things about Chrome are it's merged search and address bar and the "Start" page which is a page that sort of evolves with your browsing habits.  I should also mention it's speed.  It's faster then FireFox which is saying something.  All of these things have made me love Chrome. 

Then I got a netbook (an HP mini which I love, except of the battery life) and I found myself wishing I could use that half an inch of space at the top of the browser for actually viewing pages instead of just as a search and address bar.  But Chrome is all about simplicity and I guess that falls into the category of "extra features" which Chrome is all about not having.  It certainly wasn't enough to make me switch back to Firefox or IE but the seed had been planted and I was starting the question my decision to abandon the more feature-rich browsers.

So what does this have to do with Flock?  Well even though I felt it was cluttered I still decided to give it a little more of a chance since there were a few drawbacks to the uncluttered Chrome.  Once I saw Flock's designs and features for keeping you simultaneously connected to all of your online accounts I really started to open up to it.  Right now I usually have about 4 tabs in Chrome open and just sort of jump between them randomly to check up on things.  Flock completely eliminates any need for this.  It gives a very compact but effective visual cue of which accounts have unchecked items and lets you bring up an account with one click.  That's pretty sweet. 

Then I discovered the Feeds reader.  I fell in love with that right away.  Nothing terribly special about it.  Just the fact that it's integrated and is implemented very well is, by it's self, more then I could have hoped for.  I'm all about one-stop-shops and Flock was really delivering with the web experience. I decided that I would use it for my social sites at the very least and I could do my heavy browsing with Chrome. 

I got my HP Mini out and loaded it up.  Setup my accounts.  Checked and replied to some messages from friends and was overall very happy with it.  I pulled up the Feeds reader and clicked on an article that caught my interest.  After the page loaded I felt that same longing for a full screen mode that I'd had with Chrome except it was a little more intense since Flock had even less screen real estate.  Almost out of reflex I tapped the F11 button.  To my surprise and utter joy Flock morphed to a beautiful full screen mode that utilized every millimeter of the display.  On a 10.1'' screen this is a priceless feature.  After I saw this I popped open the Blog editor and have been typing ever since. 

I'll, most likely still use Chrome on my desktop for it's shear speed and simplicity but for my Mini it's Flock all the way.

Flock can be downloaded here: http://www.flock.com/

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Twitter is cool

This is my first blog so I'm really just trying to get something out there but I really do have something to say too.  Twitter is cool.  Awesome even.

I've spent the last 12 hours doing only 3 things; studying differential equations, sleeping and bugging all my friends to use Twitter.  I think Twitter is so cool that it inspired me to start a blog.  I've been inspired before but this is the first time that I'm actually following through with it.  Why? Because it's the missing link in all these social networking infrastructures enabled by the Internet.  You have your Social Sites (Facebook, MySpace), you have your blogs (do you need an example if your reading this?) you have photo sharing (Photobucket, Picasa) and so on and so forth.  And lets be honest, the social sites do a pretty go job of rolling all these into one package... except for one thing: texting.

Now I don't mean instant messaging because Facebook has an awesome in-browser app that does just that.  I mean SMS text messages from cell phones.  In my little world this is the primary form of communication by a big margin.  It is also the most efficient form of communication by that same margin.  Where are you? What are you doing? Do you want to meet?  Call me!  These are all one-liners that initiate communication and can usually be answered back with one-liners.  Are these terribly exciting or interesting?  Not at all, but they are our most common forms of interaction.  

Twitter made the connection.  They have effectively connected our cell phones to our social sites and back to our cell phones.  I am grateful.  I can now update my status on twitter (and Facebook) by sending a text message from my phone.  I can post a picture with a caption by sending an email from my phone.  Twitter texts me when my close friends post anything on Twitter.  So even if I'm stuck in a crowded bar I can let my friends know what's up with me and I will know what's up with them (but only if I want too!)  You can easily enable and disable texts to your phone by sending a text to Twitter (or with a button on your Twitter home page.)  

How is this better then just plain old text messages?  Twitter was not designed for one-to-one communication.  Text messages were.  If I want to go to lunch with my friends I need to send them all text messages and then deal with coordinating and responding to the individual replies.  With twitter I can just send it the text "Lunch at 12?"  and any of my friends that have device updates enabled for my posts will get the message on their device and then they can just twitter back.  Maybe we'll even get a few more people then we otherwise would have.  THAT is social networking!

I'm finding I could keep ranting about this on a couple more points but I'll stop.  In conclusion, Twitter is cool.  To my friends: Please get an account.