Bing.com, Oompa Loompa Labor Unions, and Other Solutions to Problems That Don’t Really Exist

So perhaps my title is a bit harsh regarding what the folks in Redmond are doing (or trying to do) with search, and it's likely that I take more exception to the Bing.com marketing campaign than to the search engine itself.

However, marketing speaks to how a company wants their product represented to the world. If Microsoft is representing Bing.com as the "cure" to "search overload," then one has to assume that "search overload" is an actual affliction or problem of some kind.

But is that really the case? Have you ever not been able to find information on tickets to Hawaii, what to avoid eating when pregnant, or cell phones (to use examples from the Bing TV commercials).

Don't get me wrong--search technology (regardless of the provider) is not perfect by any means. But short of the search robots having the (artificial) sentience to read and consciously evaluate, the technologies that search providers use now is pretty good. And even then, Bing still falls a bit short of "pretty good."

Let's take search "tickets to hawaii," the initial query from probably my favorite Bing commercial (and in my opinion, the least creepy--with the pregnant lady being the creepiest. I think it's because she reminds me of the woman from The Shining).

The first difference you'll notice is the prominence Bing gives to their own vertical/universal/blended search results-- specifically, price samples from various cities along with a note that "[a]nalysis of billions of airfares indicates these fares aren't likely to drop." A very nice feature.

Google doesn't offer any blended search results comparable to Bing's, and instead opts to give the user the prominent site links for its first website, cheaptickets.com.

Cheaptickets.com also is the first organic result on Bing.com, minus the prominent links. This gives Bing a "cleaner" feel and appearance compared to Google's SERP, and instead they offer prominent links and snippets of copy using a prefetch popup that appears when the user hovers over the right hand side of an individual listing. Again, a very nice feature.

However, the nice features Bing has don't make up for its failure as a "decision" engine. As we continue to compare the SERPs, we see Bing has etickethawaii.com ranked #3, whereas Google has an interior page of orbitz.com at #3. At first glance, etickethawaii.com seems like it could be a legitimate #3, but once you read the meta description and then the prefetch popup, you'll find that it's not at all related to getting "tickets to hawaii" (in the sense that we want to get tickets to travel to Hawaii). Instead, etickethawaii.com is a website for University of Hawaii athletics tickets! Moreover, Stubhub.com, Bing's #4 listing, is also focused on UH football tickets.

To be certain, Google also lists stubhub.com in its top 10 for "tickets to hawaii," along with ticketcity.com which is also geared towards UH athletics tickets. However, the athletics-related websites round out the bottom of the top 10, sitting below the fold in positions 8, 9, and 10, rather than giving them prominence above the fold, as Bing does.

So while Bing is being touted as the world's first "decision engine," it's somewhat funny to see that even for a problem in their commercials that they claim to have solved, there are still very big problems with the algorithm "deciding" the intent of the user.

It's very likely that this is because algorithms lack the intelligent reasoning to consider the importance of the word "to" in the query "tickets to hawaii." In general, algorithms skip over prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and even pronouns (unless specifically told to do otherwise by the user) because it reduces the number of words which need to be evaluated and because more often than not, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs will provide the best information to the algorithm for it to find relevant pages.

But as I learned in so many philosophy and logic classes, one small word can make a world of difference in determining meaning or intent. In listing both plane ticket information and athletics ticket information for the query "tickets to hawaii," both Google and Bing seem to overlook the word "to." And to me, "tickets to hawaii" can only mean travel tickets to get to the Hawaiian Islands.

Although, growing up in ACC and SEC country, perhaps that only goes to show my disbelief that all that many people are actually trying to buy tickets to see the WAC's University of Hawaii Warriors play anything. ;)