{"id":1188,"date":"2011-11-05T08:15:08","date_gmt":"2011-11-05T15:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/?p=1188"},"modified":"2019-12-06T12:45:41","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T20:45:41","slug":"microsoft-buys-a-verb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/microsoft-buys-a-verb\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Buys a Verb"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember this one from PragPub<\/em>? It\u2019s by John Shade, a writer I discovered in a dark place.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Columnist John Shade casts a jaundiced eye on Microsoft\u2019s latest attempt to out-google Google.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Can Microsoft really challenge Google on its own turf? And why would they even try? John Shade casts a jaundiced eye at Bing, Wolfram Alpha, and other attempts to transcend Google.<\/p>\n

Microsoft is an agile company.<\/p>\n

You doubt me? I can understand that. I\u2019m pretty sketchy at the best of times. You probably figure that being agile is one of those lean and hungry things, while Microsoft is more of a fat and bloated thing. You get no argument from me. After the first billion dollars or so, any company can pretty much forget about being described as lean, even by its most loyal sycophants. But I\u2019m standing my ground on hunger: no matter how huge and bloated Microsoft gets, it always stays hungry. Hunger got inside Microsoft when it was just a greedy leer in Bill Gates\u2019s eye. Microsoft has hungry DNA. Hungry, paranoid, and quintessentially nerdy DNA.<\/p>\n

Yes, nerdy. I hate to tell you this, but as long as there is a Microsoft you will never get rid of the popular stereotype of a computer nerd. Microsoft makes the stereotype true. Microsoft as a company is killer smart, socially inept, and wears orange socks.<\/p>\n

This is mere common knowledge.<\/p>\n

But agile, you ask? Yes, agile. The Microsoft agility mantra is Agility through Paranoia. Bill Gates\u2014or the spirit of Bill Gates that is the twisted soul of Microsoft\u2014has always been motivated by the certainty that someday some bright young hacker will come along and redefine the market, rearchitect the platform, rewrite the rulebook, move the cheese, or somehow change some fundamental something and rip the rightful riches from Microsoft\u2019s jewel-encrusted belly.<\/p>\n

Technically it\u2019s always two<\/em> bright young hackers. Andreessen and Bina, Filo and Yang, Page and Brin. Why two? Think Gates and Allen: Microsoft itself was founded by two bright young hackers who changed the game, so they know how the game-changing game is played. That\u2019s the Microsoft corporate view of pair programming, as a matter of fact: some pair of programmers somewhere is at this very moment plotting our destruction. You probably didn\u2019t know that.<\/p>\n

What Microsoft Wants<\/strong><\/p>\n

So I ask myself, what does Microsoft, in all its bloated nerdy paranoid agility, want? Easy, it wants what Google has. It wants a verb.<\/p>\n

The verb \u201cto google\u201d is in the OED. The OED!<\/em> People who\u2019ve never used The Google talk glibly about googling their acquaintances. Google has attained to the holy pantheon of Verbed Brands. It\u2019s up there with xerox and slashdot and twitter and tivo on Brand Olympus. Even Apple and Sony aren\u2019t verbs. Once you\u2019re verbed, you\u2019re forever. You can\u2019t buy cred like that.<\/p>\n

Unless you\u2019re Microsoft.<\/p>\n

Microsoft would like to buy a verb. Microsoft has never had a verb. Nobody words<\/em> a letter or excels<\/em> a budget. Some people use powerpoint<\/em> as an epithet, but it\u2019s not the same. Microsoft wants to buy a verb, and the verb it wants to buy is bing<\/em>. If Microsoft has its way you will soon be binging left and right. You\u2019ll tell your friends to just bing it, you\u2019ll assure your boss or client, hey no problem, I can bing that. You\u2019ll confess to spending all afternoon binging. You\u2019ll become a hardcore binger.<\/p>\n

Bing, as you know unless you\u2019ve been living under a hype-blocking rock, is the name Microsoft has given to the latest version of its Live Search technology. I liked Live Search. The name, I mean, not the search tool. Live Search was a straightforward name; it had no personality, but it had character. But Live Search suffered from two problems. First, Google owns<\/em> search. Second, Google owns the word<\/em> for search. Live Search? Is that something you use to google things? See? It doesn\u2019t work. It\u2019s quixotic to try to compete with the company that owns the category, but it\u2019s flat-out stupid to try to compete with the company that owns the word<\/em> for the category.<\/p>\n

But Microsoft can\u2019t walk away from search any more than it could walk away from the eyeball battlefield of the 1990s that was hilariously miscalled the browser \u201cmarket,\u201d and for the exact same reason. The hive mind that is the Microsoft brain trust lives in mortal fear of those bright young hackers who change the rules of the game. And Page\/Brin is the new Andreessen\/Bina. In the 1990s the emerging center of the galaxy was the browser window; in the 2000s it\u2019s the search engine results page. The SERP.<\/p>\n

So Microsoft has to compete with Google but it can\u2019t compete with Google. What\u2019s the solution? Easy: redefine the category. Declare search dead and christen its replacement. Break a bottle over its bow and call it Bing.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how it\u2019s intended to work: Google owns search and the name for search, but search is just a service. The SERP, though, is concrete. It\u2019s the internet\u2019s prime real estate. That\u2019s what you need to own, and if you can peel that away from Google, you win. So you just need to bribe people to come to your SERP and somehow get them to stay. Then you monetize the heck out of it. Flog those eyeballs for all they\u2019re worth.<\/p>\n

OK, you see the flaw in this plan, I suppose. To get people to hang around on your binging SERP, you\u2019ve got to make it sticky. Well, even I know how to accomplish that: the page just needs to be extremely well designed, focused with laserlike intensity on function, rich, simple, and elegant. That\u2019s all. And you just know that Microsoft\u2019s natural inclination is to chintz it up with five flavors of gingerbread and dress it in orange socks. If anyone can create a non-sticky SERP, it\u2019s Microsoft.<\/p>\n

The BitTorrent of Search<\/strong><\/p>\n

To see how you might go about end-running around Google with a better SERP, take a look at Cuil<\/a>. I\u2019m sure Microsoft did. Cuil indexes massive amounts of data, analyzes the context of discovered search terms, and presents the results as a sort of newspaper front page because, hey, nothing says 2009 like a newspaper. Cuil usually figures out that your search term has several meanings and offers the opportunity to dig deeper in any of these meanings in a sidebar, sort of like a Wikipedia disambiguation page.<\/p>\n

The key is to claim that you\u2019re doing more than just search. Semantic Knowledge Discovery through Relevance-Intuiting Neural Network Algorithms. I just made that up, but it\u2019s more or less the template. Feel free to steal it. Chances are, I did. Yebol<\/a>, in fact, promises smarter search through neural networks. Wowd<\/a> wants to be the BitTorrent of search. Hakia<\/a> and Clusty<\/a> do clustering: grouping semantically-related results into categories for further search. So does Cuil, it seems to me. So does Bing. So, in fact, does Google, but we\u2019re not talking about Google here.<\/p>\n

The one thing you absolutely must do is to refer to Google\u2019s SERP as \u201cten blue links.\u201d Because, you know, blue is so 2008<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Or if you\u2019re a super-genius you can skip search entirely and just compute<\/em> the answers people are looking for. That\u2019s what Wolfram Alpha<\/a> claims to do. After reinventing science, super-genius and Mathematica language developer Stephen Wolfram retreated to his secret lab in an undisclosed location at 100 Trade Center Drive in Champaign, Illinois. Wolfram is so brilliant that he powers light bulbs, so you just knew he was working on some radical project destined to stun the world.<\/p>\n

Now after seven years he has emerged, and the world is well and truly gobsmacked. Turns out the polymathematician inventor of A New Kind of Science has been working on a search engine. Or rather, A New Kind of Google. Or maybe A New Kind of Interface to Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

Wolfram Alpha is the eponymous answer engine, capable, according to its inventor, of parsing English-language queries and not merely looking up but actually computing<\/em> the answers using the awesome computational power of Stephen Wolfram\u2019s brain channeled through Mathematica functions and crunched on multiple supercomputers, ultimately to be displayed as glorious Gif images.<\/p>\n

As soon as Wolfram Alpha, or WA, as I like to call it, went online, I was there to poke it with some pointed questions.<\/p>\n

What do they call a quarter pounder with cheese in France?<\/p>\n

Wait, wait, I know this.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m wai-ting.<\/p>\n

Assuming any type of McDonald\u2019s Quarter Pounder | Use McDonald\u2019s Quarter Pounder, plain or McDonald\u2019s Quarter Pounder, with cheese instead.<\/p>\n

With cheese, please.<\/p>\n

McDonald\u2019s Quarter Pounder, with cheese: serving size 1 sandwich (185 g), total calories 460, total fat 24 g, saturated fat 9 g, trans fat 1 g.<\/p>\n

Argh. And in France they call it\u2014?<\/p>\n

France: country, calling code +33.<\/p>\n

Maybe we should try something simpler. Try this: how many ounces per pound?<\/p>\n

Result: 0.0625.<\/p>\n

Not in my kitchen it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Bing: Google, Embraced and Extended<\/strong><\/p>\n

So how terrible is Bing? Now, now that\u2019s not a healthy attitude. Just look where that kind of cynicism has gotten me. The fact is, Bing is \u201cmuch better than expected,\u201d to quote one reviewer. That\u2019s the kind of treatment you come to expect if you\u2019re Microsoft: \u201cWe assumed it would be crap, but it\u2019s not half bad.\u201d Bing is not half bad. Here are some of the areas where Bing is clearly superior to Google:<\/p>\n

Shopping. For example, when you\u2019re looking for things to
\nbuy, Bing has a cashback program. (Microsoft will bribe you
\nto use Bing.)<\/p>\n

Travel advice. Bing gives good advice on airline travel
\nusing the Farecast service Microsoft bought. (Bing excels at
\npromoting Microsoft properties.)<\/p>\n

Video. When Bing finds a video, it doesn\u2019t just give you one
\nof those blue links, it plays the video for you right there
\nin the SERP. (Testing the video copyright waters for the
\nrest of us.)<\/p>\n

Protecting you from your nasty self. If you live in India,
\nyou won\u2019t be troubled with inappropriate sexual offers
\nbecause Bing won\u2019t let you search for \u201csex.\u201d (That\u2019s what
\nCraigslist is for.)<\/p>\n

Danny Sullivan, the Seymour Hersh of search engines, complains that Bing clutters up its fine collation of travel, shopping, and local results with paid listings. I think Danny misses the point. Microsoft spent eighty million dollars promoting Bing. (And that was without Jerry Seinfeld.) It\u2019s got to get that eighty million back some way. That\u2019s why Microsoft has redesigned MSN to funnel visitors into Bing. Because they\u2019re not going to www.bing.com. And it\u2019s probably why they\u2019re hawking all that Bing bling. Although Microsoft being Microsoft, I\u2019m not sure whether Bing coffee mugs are intended as a way for Microsoft to make money off Bing or to spend money on Bing.<\/p>\n

Because Microsoft isn\u2019t stopping at a mere eighty million dollars. The company\u2019s sitting on umpty billion in cash and doesn\u2019t know what to do with it. Trying to take on Google in search is really a brilliant idea if your problem is how to burn through a few billion fast. So maybe they plan to broadcast those Bing tchotchkes on the breeze like AOL CDs.<\/p>\n

Then again, Microsoft doesn\u2019t have to outrun the bear. You know the old joke:<\/p>\n

Two lawyers are hiking through the woods and spot an unfriendly-looking bear. The first lawyer pulls a pair of sneakers out of his briefcase (in this joke, lawyers carry briefcases while hiking through the woods, OK?) and puts them on. The second lawyer stares at him and says, \u201cYou\u2019re crazy! Bears can run like 35 miles an hour! You\u2019ll never be able to outrun that bear!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have to outrun the bear,\u201d the first lawyer says. \u201cI only have to outrun you.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wouldn\u2019t have to be two lawyers, of course, but almost any joke is improved by putting a lawyer in it. OK, just to be repulsively obvious, lawyer number two is Yahoo. And Bing did indeed outrun the second lawyer during Bing\u2019s honeymoon period.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s response to all this sincerest form of flattery? Why, Google Squared, of course. If they\u2019re going to raise the pot we\u2019ll double down, Google says, mixing its card-playing metaphors. Google Squared is a Google Labs project that present search results in tabular form because the dazzling success of Wolfram Alpha and Cuil and Bing and the rest has convinced the Google gang that what you really want on your SERP is structured search result data, and, well, putting it in a spreadsheet makes it structured, right? Right.<\/p>\n

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.<\/p>\n

Looking at early tests of this project, I have to conclude that this turkey is not the exception to the no-fly rule. In fact the only explanation I can see is that Google Squared is snarkware. It\u2019s Google\u2019s way of making fun of the competition. They\u2019re such a fun-loving crowd.<\/p>\n

But the one shining and enduring truth of all search engines is this: most of what they give you is irrelevant, useless, or wrong. For all its computational power, Wolfram Alpha doesn\u2019t know how many ounces there are in a pound. Clusty and Hakia and Bing and Cuil know, but they get other things wrong. Google gets it right with its first blue link: \u201c1 pound = 16 ounces.\u201d Yay, Google. But for its second blue link it quotes Yahoo Answers: \u201cI thought it was 12, but it may be 16, I don\u2019t know.\u201d Woohoo, Yahoo.<\/p>\n

You rarely get such refreshing honesty from a search engine.<\/p>\n

About the Author<\/strong><\/p>\n

John Shade was born in Montreux, Switzerland in 1962. Subsequent internment in a series of obscure institutions failed to enlighten him so much as a foot-candle. Today he frets away the idle hours wondering if you got the light bulb joke.<\/p>\n

Reprinted from PragPub<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember this one from PragPub? It\u2019s by John Shade, a writer I discovered in a dark place. Columnist John Shade casts a jaundiced eye on Microsoft\u2019s latest attempt to out-google Google. Can Microsoft really challenge Google on its own turf? And why would they even try? John Shade casts a jaundiced eye at Bing, Wolfram […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[839],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swainesflames"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7341,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions\/7341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.swaine.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}