The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘bing’

If you go to the Silverlight version of Bing Maps, at the bottom is an application gallery which adds different features and layers to the maps. Two new Silverlight apps added today are for Events and Destination Maps.

The Events app brings up nearby events and places them as pins on the map. The name of the events appear in the left-hand column, where you can scroll through them and sort by popularity or date. You can also filter by specific times (today, tomorrow, this weekend, this week, next week, or a specific date range). The app also lets you narrow the search down by categories such as music, sports, performing arts, food & dining, and fairs & festivals.

The Destination Maps app creates a stylized map that is good for party invites or directions. The recipient gets a simplified map showing just the route from where they are coming from to where they are going, and the maps can be skinned with different background themes including a a European road map or a pirate treasure map (below).

Everyone is getting into the URL shortening game these days. Google, YouTube, and Facebook are just a few joining the likes of the established players such as Bit.ly. And now Microsoft is jumping in. But there’s something weird about their URL.

As the UK blog My Microsoft Life noticed, some of Microsoft’s Bing employees have begun publicly tweeting with the binged.it URL. Seattle PI confirmed with Microsoft that it has been used internally and is likely to be made public soon. But the odd thing about binged.it is that it’s actually one character longer than Bing’s own domain, complete with the .com part. Sure, many Bing search query URLs are going to be much longer, but then why not just shorten them using the Bing.com domain or something smaller? I don’t know how much Microsoft paid for the Bing domain, but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. And wasn’t part of the point to be shorter than Google? Why not spring for bin.gd or something?

Google’s shortener, goo.gl, is 5 characters. Facebook’s is 4 characters. Bing’s is 8 characters. Bing.com is 7 characters. Fa.il.

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Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing, but as people were scrambling for information they would have been better off doing a search on Bing than on Google. A search for “Times Square” on Google about 15 minutes after I saw my first Tweet about it turned up two-day old news results up top about New Year’s Eve preperations and generic photos of Times Square, whereas a search on Bing at least had relevant headlines from ABC News (“NYPD: No Bomb Inside Van Abandoned in Times Square”) and CNN (“Police investigate van parked in Times Square”).

Of course, Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page (click “Show options” and then “Updates” on any search), and Bing’s Twitter search page, which combines Tweets with headlines. I learned about the bomb scare and subsequent reopening of Times Square on Twitter before it even hit most news sites. But the next thing I did was search on Google. If you look now, Google is finally showing the right news results, but the screenshot above is what I saw when I searched, along with what I saw immediately after on Bing.

Google’s realtime results which show what people are saying on Twitter provides much more relevant information than its stale news search results on the main search page. Incidents such as this one show why those realtime results should be on the homepage as well, for both Google and Bing. If this was a real incident, hiding the realtime search results doesn’t do anyone much good.

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Who cares if this dude’s story of getting fired from Microsoft for not enthusiastically saying Bing is made up, mocking Steve Ballmer is good fun. Watch out for the NSFW language though

Go here to see the original: 
Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing. You’re fired!

Yesterday, we wrote about the arrival of Microsoft’s Bing app in Apple’s App Store. While Microsoft has now made a few apps for the iPhone, it’s still significant when the two bitter rivals play nice with one another. But from Bing’s perspective it makes sense. They’re trying to grow the service, and search on mobile is red hot, as is the iPhone, obviously. But perhaps more interesting is just how much Bing is promoting the App Store within its own search engine.

Doing a search for a number of popular mobile apps on Bing yields a prominent first result that pulls data from the App Store. These results include a big app icon, a description of the app, its price, its genre, and when it was released. Clicking on any of these elements will load up iTunes and take you to the App Store to get the app — again, all from Bing.

Not technically a web page, it would seem that Bing is injecting this data right into its results to make sure the user gets what they’re looking for. And that’s great, especially considering that Microsoft, of course, has a rival app store with Windows Marketplace. And their store contains many of the same apps that yield App Store results on Bing, such as Facebook and AIM.

Again, it’s great to see Microsoft giving top results to the Apple’s App Store despite the rivalry between the two, and the fact that the App Store directly competes with its own store. It’s hard to imagine Google doing the same thing ahead of its own Android apps.

Here are a few other examples of Bing App Store results:

Battleship

Red Laser

IMDb

Live Cams

[thanks Travis]

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Since the dawn of Bing, it’s been exceptionally good at one thing: Finding porn. Its new iPhone app, which launched tonight in the App Store, is no different.

By default, the app has a Safe Search setting of “Moderate.” Searching for “porn” this way yields several promising results. However, with just two clicks, any kids can turn off safe search and off they go! The porn results are nothing, if not impressive.

I love this for two reasons: 1) The app is rated 4+, yet it’s super simple to gain access to hardcore porn in a few clicks. This continues to highlight Apple’s hypocrisy when it comes to the App Store. Apps that allow you to lift up Asian schoolgirl’s outfits are just fine. Apps that make satirical references to public figures are banned. And now, apps that gives you hardcore porn at your fingertips are rated 4+. Sure, this content in on the web, and not in the app itself, but to a viewer, what’s the difference? 2) Bing continues to be a great resource for porn.

To be fair, Google’s iPhone app also allows you to search for porn. But, 1) It’s not as easy to search for just images with the Google app (image search is a plus for the Bing app) 2) the results are much less hardcore, and 3) It’s much less obvious as to how to turn off the safe search settings.

All that said, the Bing app is actually quite nice. The voice search feature (just like Google’s on the iPhone) works quite well. The app also features the standard Bing daily images complete with hover-over factoids. It also has a nice overlay on the main screen to easily search for Movies, Maps, Businesses, News, Direction, and yes Images. Find the app in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

Both images below taken on a search for “porn” with safe search turned off. As you can see, Bing returns many more great results. Badda Bing.

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Since Israeli startup Gizmoz launched three years ago, people have used its technology to create millions of 3D-realistic avatar heads from photos of themselves. But what good is a head without a body? Gizmoz found a body—lots of them, actually—in a Utah-based company called Daz 3D. The two companies are merging. Existing investors, led by Benchmark Capital, Highway 12 Ventures, and Columbia Capital, are put in an additional $5.3 million into the new, yet-to-be-named company. Previously, Gizmoz raised a total of $12.8 million, most recently $6.5 million in March, 2008 from the venture arm of Docomo, which also participated in the latest round. Daz 3D raised $4 million back in June, 2007, and targeted creative professionals as customers.

Daz 3D co-founder Dan Farr will become the CEO and Gizmoz founder Eyal Gever wil be president. The company will be headquartered in Utah. Daz 3D offers a free virtual studio for professional designers to create virtual bodies for video games, movies, and illustrations, whereas Gizmoz is more of a consumer play which helps people turn their photos into fun, 3D avatars.

The idea behind combining the two companies is to tackle a new market altogether: the burgeoning virtual goods economy in virtual worlds, social networks, and online video games. Except that instead of swords, armor, and clothing, the virtual goods the company will be selling the avatars themselves. “The fundamental consumption of digital goods is around characters,” says Gever. “They have the best looking bodies and we can generate any face. We can sell it to anyone out there.”

His plan is to partner with virtual worlds, games, and other online platforms to provide a complete 3D modeling engine for characters and avatars, and charge players for the ability to create realistic characters with their own faces. Good thing that trafficking in heads and bodies is a perfectly acceptable activity online.

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Here’s a new one. As Facebook continues to grapple with the negative press over its privacy overhaul, it’s now suggesting a new way to protect your personal information: lie about it. At least, that’s what Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy, told the Wall Street Journal in an article this evening. From the story:

Facebook also made public formerly private info such as profile pictures, gender, current city and the friends list. (Mr. Schnitt suggests that users are free to lie about their hometown or take down their profile picture to protect their privacy; in response to users’ complaints, the friends list can now be restricted to be viewed only by friends).

Of course, this directly violates Facebook’s own Terms of Service, which stipulate that users may not provide false information.

Registration and Account Security
Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:

You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.

Update: I reached out to Facebook, and Schnitt has clarified his position:

I think WSJ is paraphrasing. What I said is profile picture and current city are optional. You don’t have to include a profile picture or you can include a picture of your dog or anything you like. Similarly, you don’t have to indicate your current city or you can indicate that your current city is “Atlantis”, “Valhalla” or, again, anything you like. We hope people will use accurate information if they are comfortable doing so because that information helps them to be found by their friends, which is part of the point of joining the site.

Facebook has always been heavily reliant on its users being honest, and it has thrived because of it. It was among the first social networks to mandate the use of real names rather than aliases, which has made it easier to find friends and also forces users to take more responsibility for their actions. If Facebook is actually going to start suggesting falsifying or removing information as a means to maintain privacy, then it’s making a serious mistake.

I’ve made no secret of my dislike for Facebook’s privacy overhaul. And while there have been plenty of articles questioning Facebook’s motivations, I think we’ve yet to really see the true backlash begin. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Have you ever wondered what people are searching for right now on Google, Yahoo! or Bing? If you’ve ever been to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, then you’ll know what I’m talking about, but what if you want to see all the trends on the go? SearchTrends for the iPhone is here to help. SearchTrends displays real-time search trends for Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Twitter, and lets you search on these terms from right within the app.

SearchTrends is a great new way to stay up-to-date on popular search terms, news and events. Instead of relying on news sources, you’re keying off of what people around the world are talking about in real time.

I will say though, the UI isn’t the best. It basically only shows text, which can get boring at times. But when you’re looking at what Search Trends is showing, the data is very interesting as well as how each search engine has completely different results. (Screenshot below)

Currently, on Google the top search term is “787 first flight video” while Yahoo! is showing “Elin Nordegren” and Bing with “Tara Reid.”

In the future, I’d like to see graphs and different types of analytical data in the app comparing the three search engines side-by-side, just so you don’t have to go through each panel to see what’s going on.

SearchTrends is available for free on the App Store today. [iTunes link]

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The leaks continue to hit the web about the Nexus One, aka “The Google Phone.” Here’s the latest: The booting up of the device on video. Enjoy.

Also, here’s apparently the official logo.

[thanks Alberto]

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