back to article Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it

Google has questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure, while taking some wonderfully sly shots at the company's new decision engine search engine. The undeniable highlight of Thursday's cloud-happy Structure 09 conference was Vijay Gill, Google senior manager of engineering and architecture. As he …

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  1. sage
    FAIL

    Can't find it

    The Data Center as a Computer. "If you Bing for it," he said, "you can find it."

    I did that search on Bing, and gave up after 30 pages. I couldn't find it. I searched Google, and it was the 3rd result.

  2. geolight

    bing for it you find it?!

    you know what.. I did just that ... and guess what? I didn't get the a link to the Data Center as a computer paper... I'll stick with Google for now :-)

  3. quartzie
    FAIL

    if you bing for it, you won't find it

    In an extraordinary turn of events, or perhaps an unintended pun, binging for "The Data Center as a Computer" does not give valid results.

    Whodunit?

  4. Bryce Prewitt
    FAIL

    What does that even mean?

    "If you Bing for it," he said, "you can find it."

    Was the Google representative saying this? That's what it looks like. Was it sarcastic? I'm not quite sure what is so cutting about that, anyway.

    Plus, what all three commentators above have said.

  5. jake Silver badge

    You do realize ...

    The whole point of a corporation with a big Market Cap is to continue to provide a return for the shareholders. All of this crap is marketing. Getting their name into the public eye. That's all.

    Why do you think Enron, which never sold directly to the public, ran television ads?

    Fuck microsoft. Fuck google. Fuck! yahoo! Etc.

    Try Metacrawler ... google it, if you're too brain-dead to figure out metacrawler.com

  6. Big Al
    Welcome

    May I be the first to say that...

    I for one welcome our new restricted but strong-willed developmental overlords!

  7. Quotes
    IT Angle

    MetaCrawler

    Hmmm, MetaCrawler... where the top search results are scraped adverts from Google and the 'submit your site' link (on tools and tips page) takes you to an advertising agency site with an invalid security certificate. Looks like they prefer to monetise their traffic than serve up something useful.

    Clusty (http://clusty.com/) aggregates search engine results too but at least it differentiates their adverts. Unlike MetaCrawler it also allows you to refine your query by looking at clusters, so for example you can search for Concorde and it groups up the results into "hotel", "aircraft", "placename" and "car".

  8. Yes Me Silver badge
    IT Angle

    it hits

    ' "If you Bing for it," he would say, "you can find it." '

    Bing for "it" and they claim 4,280,000,000 results

    Google for "it" and they claim 7,360,000,000 hits

    So google is obviously 72% better at delivering useless info...

  9. yeehaa

    Ciao Google

    I blame Google Chrome. Personally, I never had problems with Google, for years, then Chrome came along and ruined: first my Facebook fun and then a site critical for my work.

    So now, I've ditched the lot. No more Google. (ok, I still have the gmail account)

    I survived !

    Binging and swinging ... Bing is very nice actually - happy days, it works for me

    (Handbag each other - I'll watch) I think the fact that Google even bothers to 'mock' Bing is an indication that Bing is hurting them

  10. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Windows...

    That's Microsoft's problem. Everything has to be Windows based and using fairly standard protocols or extensions.

    If Microsoft produced custom versions of Windows for their online services they would be able to improve things. Google can tweak the hell out of their server software, from the kernel all the way to the application software.

    In the long tun they would be better hosting using the best tool for the job. Microsoft used to write their own internal software but dropped this in favour of using other peoples tools. This saved them a lot of money. Maybe they should realise that the same would be true when it comes to their online services?

    Maybe they would learn something too, the whole "banish anything non-Microsoft" approach they seem to be taking means they have less exposure to the competition.

  11. James Pickett
    Linux

    Speed

    I like Metacrawler and Clusty, but keep coming back to Google, because of the response time. I tried Bing once...

  12. Jerome 0
    WTF?

    Bing for it

    @ the first three commenters: either Microsoft has done a very speedy patch-up job on this particular search, or you all fail at search skills. Right now, the first link in Bing for "The Data Center as a Computer" is a Google page with a link to the document in question.

  13. northern monkey
    FAIL

    @What does that even mean?

    Well a) if you bing for it, you won't actually find it (he probably already knew this),

    and b) I think he was highlighting that using bing in place of google in that ubiquitous 'just google for it' phrase just sounds stupid.

    I'm surprised the bing bod didn't go away and straight away ensure that a search for that ensured it was at least somewhere on the first page!! Even giving bing a significant amount of help by giving it the publisher as well it didn't provide it within the first 5 pages (by which point I was bored)

  14. jason 7
    FAIL

    Google not convincing

    Google's constant critiques of Bing strike me as a company that is actually quite concerned.

    After all if it was no threat at all you would just ignore it rather than keep putting it down.

    I reckon its rattled them.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Next strategic development?

    It looks as if Mr Gill has outlined the next strategic development for MS.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm...

    Number of major outages to web services operated by MS in the last six months, one maybe.

    Number of major outages to web services operated by Google in the last six months? I've lost count.

    Now who should I listen to when they talk about infrastructure design and operation?

  17. Kevin Hutchinson
    FAIL

    If you bing for it, you won't find it

    Actually Bing can't find the document. Luckily Google can. Microsoft needs to get back to basics and start programming to the cloud from the ground up, otherwise it will never catch Google, Amazon and others (Apple?).

  18. Michael Martinez
    Alert

    How very odd

    I was able to find the reference on BING without having to look deep into the search results. Perhaps some people just need more practice searching.

    BING may not always have the right answer, but it offers a breath of fresh relevance we haven't seen from Google in years.

  19. Doug Glass
    Go

    @jake

    Amen brother!

    All corporations have three goals:

    1. Grow the business.

    2. Increase the bottom line.

    3. Increase stockholder equity.

    Everything else is either in support of those goals or it's eventually discarded. And good marketing is designed to convince the buying public they need your product more than all others because sales will ultimately define a corporation's future.

    You can have the very best IT staff, the very best R&D department, the very best thinkers and the very managers. But it you're not selling your product, generally at an increasing rate, you're in a death spiral and in line to be the next General Motors style failure.

  20. Stephen Bungay
    Stop

    Bing...

    Microsoft should rename their service, bing is a bandwidth testing tool.... this straight from the man(ual) page.

    bing - compute point to point throughput using two sizes of ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets to pairs of remote hosts.

  21. davenewman
    Troll

    use quotation marks around your phrases

    Otherwise you will get back every page using any one of the words.

  22. Christopher Ahrens
    Gates Halo

    Google fails once again

    So I am supposed an advertising agency over a company that make operating server OS and applications, especially application that can scale out to an extremely large number of servers.

    And as Fraser pointed out, I think the last time MSN, Live or any one of the other Microsoft search properties was down for more than 5 minutes Live mail was still called Hotmail and Google wasn't even in existence...

    The reason that the Google "paper" wasn't in the top results in Bing is the Microsoft does not artificially alter the placement of Links, like how Google does. Wouldn't be very difficult for the speaker to say "hey I am going to use this paper in my speech, make sure its on the First page" (right behind the Sponsored links from eBay and Wikipedia, of course)

    The reason it started showing up on Bing is proof that Bing works, it detected a large number of users searching for the item and saw an increase of clicks to the one page and raised the page's ranking in results, as a search engine should.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Of course Bing will Hurt Google

    A friend of mine upgraded to IE8, because some message came up on the screen, she clicked on it, and it looked like Microsoft must be giving her sound advice. This is probably the sort of "informed decision" that millions take with their PCs.

    Guess what IE came with as its home page? Bing of course.

    Microsoft doesn't market, so much as post the turds through the letterbox. People will use bing for exactly the same reason as many use windows, because it's there. Microsoft are able to *put* it there.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Google Needs to Fail

    Apparently, the only corporation we love to hate is Microsoft. Microsoft is an OS monopoly and that's a problem. Google is a search monopoly, but it seems everyone is okay with that. Microsoft has issues and becomes the punch line of every geek's jokes. Google has huge privacy concerns and issues, but who cares?

    Personally, I'm more concerned with Google's "Big Brother" approach to technology than Microsoft's capitalist approach. Microsoft is transparent. They're all about the money. That doesn't make what they do okay, but at least it's understandable. What are Google's motivations for it's user tracking, data retention, and other curious practices? Is "Google" just Stanford geek synonym for Wannabe Illuminati?

  25. Mei Lewis
    Megaphone

    Even the article misses Gill's point

    Which is that Google is building a global (virtual) computer to run all it's applications, wheras Miscrosoft is building different ad hoc (virtual) machines for everything it does.

    Put liek that the Google guy makes a lot of sense.

  26. James Woods

    government google complex

    Im not sure I like the vulgar display of ego here from Google. Google is where it is today by abusing whatever left we have of monopoly protection. They are intertwined with the government now to the point of having virtually no oversight into what they do so of course they will always have the upperhand.

    I remember in High School back in 98 Yahoo was "the search engine". I don't think google was very popular back then or at least it wasn't really referenced in library's for use.

    Perhaps now Google does provide things that people want, gmail, a clean search engine but what google has they have because of it's monopoly status.

    Now if you try to compare google to microsoft I think you'd have to somewhat take Microsofts side on things. Yeah sure it's probably not smart trying to beat google in it's own game but Microsoft even though it's a massive fail in 2009 has actually created things that well without them, what would we be using google on?

    If microsoft would stick to doing what made it microsoft and we'd have some breaking up of the government google complex and killing lobbying all together since it only favors large business I think you would have a chance to see some competition for google and others.

    You want to live in a country that has one thing for everything? We're getting it with the current president.

  27. Ebeneser
    Alert

    Microsoft will always be rubbish

    Right from the early days 90s and 80s Microsofts goal was to sell crap to as may people as possible while removing and undermining competition. They weren't bothered if it worked properly, if it was full of bugs or infested with viruses, the goal was to suffocated the competition, famously cut off their air supply, and by being the largest and only game in town, reap the profits that that position presented. They're not interested in simple thinks like open standards, easy integration, and robust architectures, the goal is kill the competition by whatever means they can get away with, and thereby leverage their market position.

    The reason why Microsoft will always have substandard products is because high quality isn't their objective. The objective is to sell the worst software they can get away with, and use their monopoly position to ensure that their rubbish has little competition.

    The reason why Google will always beat Microsoft in the internet arena is the same reason Apple will always beat Microsoft in the operating systems arena. Microsoft focus on crap, Google and Apple focus on trying to build the best they can at any moment in time. Just look at the abortion which was Vista, it was crap because Microsoft weren't focused on building the best operating system they could, but rather they were focused figuring out how they could create a tool for desktop domination, through control and drm, they didn't have an architecture, they had a marchitecture (architecture driven by marketing).

    Are Google scared no. Are Google interested in the competition, yes. Will Google take over the world? probably. Will the world be a better place probably not.

    Sooner or later Microsoft need to realise that they aren't an internet company, they're a desktop monopoly still trying to leverage their dominant position into other markets. You can put lipstick on a pig, but its still a pig. How many decades will it take them to realise that they just don't get it, and that the world of computers would be better without them (innovation breathes a permature sign of relief).

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    multiMap from Bing in UK...

    ... seems to be popular.

    I think every map link I've clicked on in the last week goes to Bing's multiMap.

    Now, I suppose if MS wanted to commission additional research it might wish to consider why it gets easily flamed.

    Why do discussion groups (not just el Reg) show instances of MS h8, Google, Apple, ... (linux?) lurve?

    In additional to comments made above PR seems important.

    But maybe the poor MS PR is from a small, loyal bunch of people?

    Maybe MS widestream appeals are robust?

    I dunno but it seems that there may be a nugget of something for MS to explore.

  29. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @jake ... amen again

    "Fuck microsoft. Fuck google. Fuck! yahoo! Etc."

    Well said.

    "the creatures outside looked from pig to man ... but already it was impossible to say which was which"

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Surfcontrol / Websense blocks Bing...

    ...as a CHAT site.

    I won't be amending that for my users.

  31. T L
    Megaphone

    Googlewobble

    Google are worried/bothered/whatever... If they were not... they wouldn't be talking about it!!! But out they come with their subtle and not so subtle jabs and attacks.

    Yes Bing does not find some things that Google does... and guess what? ...It works the other way round as well.

    All these search engines (Google particularly) like to state how much of the web they scan/document/trawl etc, ...whenever I search for something particularly rare... I tend to use at least four different searchers, and guess what... They all return different stuff. And the amount of stuff I regularly find on the web... which Google has no idea is there... MIND BLOWING!!!

  32. ZenCoder
    Unhappy

    I wish I had a had a use for the "cloud" ..

    As a programmer I am really curious about GFS, BigTable, Map Reduce ... and I'd love to do a Hadoop project.

    Unfortunately nothing I do would remotely benefit from "cloud" computing. I never developed anything that was more distributed than putting the database on a separate web server.

    People at Google get to do cool new kinds of programming that I'll likely never experience.

    I wish I was one of those programmers forced to learn a new way of thinking.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Neither search is superb; GoOgle is reactionary

    GoOgle is reacting to a Bing innovation. GoOgle search results are tainted by one simple problem: "resultors" may "buy" their way up in the list (gain more relevance using monetization). I'm ignorant as to the ordering of Bing results.

    Another simple usage advantage for me of Bing over GoOgle? GoOgle's satellite map of my neighborhood is 5 years older than Bing's. (I've watched this degree of accuracy for 3 years...same image for both services...no updates for either, of course.)

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    lols

    http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000061/quotes

    Jar Jar Bings: "Ooh mooey mooey I love you!"

    Jar Jar Bings: "Better dead here than deader in the Core. Ye gods, whatta meesa sayin'?"

    Jar Jar Bings: "Mesa cause one, two-y little bitty axadentes, huh? Yud say boom de gasser, den crashin der bosses heyblibber, den banished."

    @trench says: Jar Jar Bings - AND SO CAN YOU!

  35. jrb
    IT Angle

    wow

    google isn't often this critical of competitors, or defensive of its work like this. i wonder why they feel the need to be so bitchy.

  36. Waffa
    WTF?

    WHY the hell google hides google news from some countrys?!?!

    I would like to know: WHY the hell google hides google news from some countries like Estonia for example?

    Thy have "scholar" and even groups and calendar link in usual google search but NO news link. I am sore more people would use news link because even some our newspapers are indexed and it's great way to see different news. if you click "more" you still can not get news. If u click "even more" then it takes to the page where u can find the news and then u have to type in what you searching for - how much sucks that? A lot

    is there any reason for that?

    Well.. i forget to say: you can ONLY get "more" link if you change google language to ENGLISH... if you use it in OUR language you even do not see "more" link and you will miss out most of the google features. I mean why the hell is google trying to block off most services (like news) from some other countrys?

    WTF*?

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @James Woods - You're confusing me

    You're trying to tell us that Google is a monopoly ? Nobody forces you to type www.google.com in your browser, you're doing only if you like the results your searching for. On the other hand, Microsoft, forcing IE8 on your computer claiming it's a security update and forcing you to use Microsoft search or whatever bing it is named because by default it's hardwired in your MS browser, is the poor little guy, helper of widows ans orphans ?

    You're suggesting breaking up google and killing lobying (I assume for Google too) because Microsoft is an honest company, never involved in monopolistic anti-competitive behavior ?

    Dude, renew your medication and wait until you become a little more coherent.

  38. contextfree
    WTF?

    Azure

    I can never tell much from articles like this -- god knows what really went on at the event -- but isn't what the Google guy allegedly described more or less what MSFT is trying to do with its Azure services platform?

  39. Franklin
    Thumb Down

    @Christopher Ahrens

    "The reason it started showing up on Bing is proof that Bing works, it detected a large number of users searching for the item and saw an increase of clicks to the one page and raised the page's ranking in results, as a search engine should."

    As a search engine should? That's a TERRIBLE idea, and I sincerely hope Bing doesn't work that way, or it will soon be corrupted into uselessness. Clicks on a link should not affect a page's search engine ranking, for obvious reasons that will be left as an exercise to the reader. (if you need a hint, think of what a simple bot written in a few lines of Perl could do to the rankings of a search for "Viagra".)

  40. Goat Jam
    Gates Horns

    @jrb & others

    "google isn't often this critical of competitors, or defensive of its work like this. i wonder why they feel the need to be so bitchy."

    Oh, lessee, Google Guy is standing on stage with Microsoftie, who is busy waffling on about how hard it is to build a super scalable data center infrastructure which is something Google Guy has already actually done.

    Google Guy would not be human if he could resist making a few well placed jibes at the other guys expense.

    Microsoft will NEVER make a decent scalable infrastructure network, not while they continue to try and build it on top of a kludgy single user OS that evolved from DOS with hacked on multi-user bits and a gui.

  41. Tom Cooke

    @doody

    Animal Farm - I like it! (always wondered why they call them server farms :-)

  42. TeeCee Gold badge
    FAIL

    @David Swales

    Old, old news. Websense fixed that in an update about five minutes after the original Bing launch.

    I think your users might thank you more for keeping their protective systems at least vaguely up to date. Less liable to pwnage, you know......

  43. myxiplx
    Thumb Up

    @jrb - why now?

    I see it as google enjoying a laugh at Microsofts expense. MS have been very public in the amount of money they are throwing at online services, and are aggressively targetting google.

    What google have done is let them quietly dig away, and then just as Microsoft announce their massive achievement, google have poitned out to the world just how big a hole Microsoft have dug for themselves. Google's approach is fundamentally more efficient and scalable, and it means Microsoft for the foreseeable future are going to have to spend a lot more money than google to provide equivalent services.

    Genius move by google, MS are going to be spitting feathers over this and it's going to take them years to catch up, by which time I'm sure google will have moved the goalposts again.

  44. Chris C

    @AC re: @James Woods - You're confusing me

    "You're trying to tell us that Google is a monopoly ? Nobody forces you to type www.google.com in your browser, you're doing only if you like the results your searching for. On the other hand, Microsoft, forcing IE8 on your computer claiming it's a security update and forcing you to use Microsoft search or whatever bing it is named because by default it's hardwired in your MS browser, is the poor little guy, helper of widows ans orphans ?"

    Yes, Google IS a monopoly. It doesn't matter if you are "forced" to use their service or not. You are not "forced" to use Windows, but nobody denies that Microsoft has a a monopoly on operating systems. By the way, you're doing something wrong if you had IE8 "forced" onto your computer. I'm still running IE6 for those extremely rare times when I need to use IE. I have not installed IE7, and I have not installed IE8. Similarly, you are not "forced" to use any search engine. You can simply go to the website of your preferred search engine and perform your search from there.

    As for me, I've gone back to using Yahoo, and only using Google when I can't find what I need from Yahoo. Far too many times I've searched with Google and the words I searched for aren't in the results. Why? Because those words were on pages linking to the page Google indexed. Who the hell cares what the linking page contains?!? Show me what I'm searching for! This has become a common occurrence for me. If a search engine shows "results" which don't contain the terms you searched for, then it's useless.

  45. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    generic title...

    @AC 00:39 - Of course Google is a monopoly and you are constantly forced to use Google, where do you think all of those adverts come from? You do know that they grab data about you from web sites all over the place, just have a look at where your network traffic goes.

    @Doody - Let me guess, you're in your GCSE year and you are studying Animal Farm? I'll go further to guess that, as you find Jake's comment ammusing, you've not done anything by Oscar Wilde.

  46. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    In other news...

    Butter is the Devil's spunk. (Issued by the Margarine Marketing Board.)

  47. imposter
    Stop

    @AC questioning monopoly

    Monopoly power is defined by the product basically being seen as something with no real alternative by any number of people. In the UK, the competition commission considered monopoly power must exist in a large quantity at 25% market share (this may be due to ignorance of alternatives, false image for them or the product or just the way the brand has been built up as different, whether it is or not). At 95% market share or more the firm is considered a "pure monopoly" that is to say it's so huge that it's competitors are insignificant or close, while for most people there's no alternative.

    So yes, google is, for many people, a monopoly and close to a "pure" one too.

  48. NogginTheNog
    Flame

    @ Goat Jam

    If you are of the belief that the Windows server operating systems "evolved from DOS" then I suggest you either do some fairly simple background reading (Bing for it? ;-) or find a career other than IT...

  49. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    I used bing once

    As it happens I was on Microsoft's website to look up what "Bing" was. Mainly because the launch of the stupid named search engine skipped me blessedly by.

    When I installed IE8 it asked me what I wanted as my search engine, If I wanted Bing on there but it let me leave it as Google.

    Then I realised that I don't use that computer for internet searches and only for games, so immediatly went back to my Firefox browser with yahoo, remembering the horrible moment as a bad dream when I was faced with IE8 and Bing.

    This article reminds me of the sketch Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield do with bill gates and steve jobs, two sad geeks talking themselves up while everyone else just enjoys their lives around them.

    Who cares what they do, Google will continue to ruin search results with those that were paid for and reporting on pages linked to the existing page. MS will continue to roll out rubbish in playing catch up, instead of focusing on what people want, a workable, cheap OS that lets the owner do what the owner wants and is secure with helpful messages when things go a little awry. (Which shouldn't be daily) Leaving the online market (Which they have lost) and mobile market alone (Which they continue to do worse in than the desktop market).

    A penguin because linux just tries to do the one thing (Make a decent OS) and perfecting that one thing over time.

  50. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Introspection is good too

    Would Mr. Gill care to explain the extremely poor performance of youtube? Or the fact that HD videos are sometime working and many times not? Or that google for all its monopoly money is incapable and / or refuse to seriously apply privacy law?

    I'm really not sure exactly which application from Goggle apart from the search engine (which basically hasn't made any breakthrough progress in years - except as a monopoly money machine for google) is really useful?

    Mr. Gill can very well mock other but can he please care to have a look at google and point to the money making products and services there - especially the in-house developed projects? Perhaps he'll acknowledge that for all the glitz google is a one trick pony.

  51. ElReg!comments!Pierre
    Gates Horns

    Google AND MS are evil

    But Google makes stuff that works.

    The key here is not whether Ning is good (it's not) or if Google Search is good (not that bad, imho), but that the MS guy was all like "it's completely impossible to get people to work together on a coherent platform, that's why we spend millions in tweaking every app separately", to which the Google man answered "the coherent platform approach works very well for us, ta very much".

    Actually it's much more than the cloud thing. It's obviously a culture problem at MS. Even their bloody office applications don't communicate well with each other and have different ways of representing the same things, and different ways of performing the same actions. That's the most basic level of integration, and MS fails even that test, so what coherence would you expect when it comes to apps that perform different kinds of tasks from different kinds of data?

    The secret is, there appears to be no IT management at MS. It's a huge boat with a lot of momentum, full of individual rowers (more like teams of rowers actually) who push in random directions at random times hoping for the best.

  52. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    I think I can sum this up

    blah blah blah blah...... /deep breath ... blah blah blah MS is evil/useless .... blah blah blah blah blah ... /deep breath ... Google is evil/useless ... blah blah blah blah.

    There 99% of the above comments distilled into one easy to read sentence for you, no need to thank me.

    Maybe I'm just getting old but really the rabid fanboi-ism over operating systems, search engines, games etc etc is so interminably tiresome. Can we at least TRY to step up our game a little bit here guys? The article was a shock given it's author as I had no idea Cade was capable of writing a Google related article without his usual "I desperately hate/envy google" thing kicking in full bore. Seriously if we can get a balanced article from Cade about Google then surely you lot can step up an do the same.

    Personally I'm with the commenter who noted that in light of the company he was keeping at the moment and the presentations that MS had given, that Mr. Gill showed he is indeed human by taking a couple pot shots at MS and Bing. It's natural and frankly he is correct in the assertion that the "stove pipe" model that MS is applying isn't the way to go if they want to seriously compete with Google. Does that mean that Google aren't worried about Bing? I don't know. However they would be extraordinarily foolish to not be concerned about Bing. This is after all MS we are talking about here, the company that has managed to gain dominance in the OS markets through a mix of shady business practices, semi clever marketing, and the finest lawyers money can buy. To think they wont apply those things when it comes to Bing or any area they really want to get into is toying with fate and tempting it to send you firmly into the number two spot. While MS has an uphill battle with Bing and while I don't think it will ever go any where (much like the zune, their half assed mapping service, etc) there is no denying the effort they are putting into it and as such it shouldn't be totally discounted right now.

  53. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    If Bing has Goolgle rattled...

    perhaps Google should release an OS. They could start with a server OS, they seem to have the back end of their system working pretty well. It would certainly be interesting to see a large company with lots of cash dive into the OS market.

    I know people will now bring up IBM OS 2. That was a long time ago and I think the general population has found that the lustre has worn off Microsoft. Never used OS 2, how was it?

    Hand grenade because that would start a war.

  54. Mage Silver badge
    Boffin

    OS2

    The problem was that Win95 was really DOS & Win3.11 with a new shell so everything worked.

    OS/2 Warp really needed OS/2 apps, OS/2 drivers. So lots of hardware didn't work and lots of applications didn't exist even though it was a real OS.

    In 1989 after parting with IBM, MS released MS-OS/2 with LAN Manger. This is why 1993's MS real OS was NT3.1 and not NT1.x

    NT3.51 in 1995 and to a lesser extent NT4.0 was also a death knell for OS/2 as they ran OS/2 console apps natively, DOS programs in the NT Virtual Dos Machine, 16 Bit Windows apps (office 4.3 and Office 95) using WOW translation of 16bit WinAPI calls to native NT... NT can (or did upto 4.0) also run on an OS/2 HPFS partition...

  55. Steve Roper
    Gates Horns

    Bing as a verb

    For the past 20 years, to "bing" something in my neck of the woods has meant to cook it in a microwave oven (from the "Bing" sound the oven makes when your 3-day-old reheated pizza is done). Example: Pizza too cold? Bing it!

    And that is what the word will continue to mean to me and my mates, regardless of what Microsoft tries to virally market it as.

  56. Inachu
    FAIL

    Har har har har har!

    Use safe search so you get rated g results for both bing and google.

    Next image search for "pretty girls"

    Bing: about 20%-35% of the search results have animals in it.

    Google only has about %3 animals in the search results.

    PROOF that BING fails.

  57. Steve Roper
    Badgers

    @Har har har har har

    Not just that bing fails, but that it's also run by furfags!

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