Search visionary retires from Microsoft's Bing battles

One of the search brains hired by Microsoft through its $100m acquisition of Powerset to help build Bing against Google has become the latest executive to leave the company. Barney Pell has signed off after just three years, having joined Microsoft as co-founder and chief technology of natural-language search specialist …

[Anton Channing]

Rats

Sinking ship...

[xyz]

Well they got that right....

In Scotland a bing is a slag heap and that says it all re this POS.

linky: http://www.snh.org.uk/publications/on-line/advisorynotes/50/50.htm

Paris... 'cos, well I'd bing that.

[Pat O'Ban]

Bit slow on the uptake

"rather than pursue natural-language query, he's trying to understand what eBay's 97 million registered users are looking for through greater analysis of the data they create while conducting their searches."

Google's Peter Norvig eloquently talks about the benefits of this approach in a 2004 podcast

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail382.html

[Big-nosed Pengie]

Bing?

What is this "Bing" of which you speak?

[Arctic fox]

Turf-wars and their consequences

It is fairly clear that Microsoft are moving from a highly vertically structured management with *many* divisions to a more horizontal structure with fewer divisions and fewer layers between them and senior managers like Sinfosky. Looks like someone, at any rate, has drawn some lessons from the cluster-f**k that led to such cockups as Vista and Kin - two classic examples of what you get when a large corporation has developed warring camps where the senior manager in the division concerned is more interested in protecting his own turf than in the company's overall results.