The web offers a wealth of information; some of it is easily accessible, and the rest is untapped. According to Cnet News, Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, may have found a way to tap into a large component of that wealth. Microsoft is supposedly forming a partnership with Facebook and Twitter in order to enable status updates on each of these sites to come up as Bing search engine results. This means that every useless update about a favorite type of coffee, what someone's child's first word was, and a random person's current location could all be popping up as answers to inquiries. However it also means that political status updates, pertinent world events, and celebrity sightings could be popping up, too. To me it seems as if Microsoft is just throwing unnecessary logs into a blazing fire; at some point too much wood suffocates the flames.
As far as benefits go, I don't think that Twitter, Facebook, or Microsoft will gain too much from this deal. If Facebook and Twitter users even take notice of the fact that Bing turns up user posts, very few of them will actually take that into consideration while updating statuses. The only real benefit that Microsoft might come away from this with is publicity; people may start using Bing more frequently than Google just because of the buzz this deal could potentially generate. People who are actually interested in what Twitter and Facebook users have to say already have, or will create, an account for one of these sites. I think this partnership is a poorly planned publicity stunt that will, in the long run, benefit none of the parties involved.
I'm not sure how much of an impact this will have on future web design. In the capacity of search features on any given website this new realm of status updates may need to be taken into consideration, but outside of this field I highly doubt this potential partnership will have any significant change on the manner in which websites are actually designed.
You brought up some good points here. I did not think about how this will clutter the search results for this type of thing. I have very rarely performed this type of search myself and after doing it just now, I can already see how cluttered searching for a particular user can be on Facebook let alone a new status. Just the thought of a million Yankeeeeeees rule!!! Facebook status's on Google disgusts me (Red Sox fan). However, while you can see that this could bring Bing some attention, that may be all that Microsoft really is looking for in this. If they can get their foot in the door of the market, then they can begin to offer features that would make it stand out. You can see this in all the cases where Microsoft delves into a new market (Xbox, Zune). They first will approach the market, then try to distance themselves with new features. I would watch down the line to see what the new feature from Bing is and how Google will approach a counter action to it.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the only thing to gain for this new feature is publicity. I don't see any real significance of making this change it just would add a bunch of random thought and feeling expressed in people's statuses that will just clutter the internet. Political figures and big name corporation might be able to benefit from this by having their statuses that may be off importance available to the public, but if people and companies wanted to get information to the public people would probably use another media outlet.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the clutterness and the gaining publicity with the new feature from the last 2 comments. And i agree with the author of this posts regarding the fact that we will be getting bad/stupid results from Bing seraching people's status updates. I believe it is a waste of time to get search results about someoene's updates since if you are friends with the person on facebook or follower on twitter, you can look at their profile/page yourself -- there's no need for Bing.
ReplyDeleteIsn't Bing's whole advertising campaign about how previous search engines caused pointless result clutter, and Bing was the answer to that? I didn't think this was true before; Google rarely lets me down. Yet, with this new move, Bing is letting the clutter take over the search. Good job, Bing. You've already sold out.
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