back to article Microsoft claims 'biggest' show-biz investment with Bing refresh

Microsoft is throwing the combined might of Hollywood, the record labels and the games industry at Google with its latest Bing update. On Tuesday evening the company unveiled Bing Entertainment, which provides the ability to search, view and - depending on the medium - purchase films, TV, music and games. Microsoft called the …

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  1. AndyS
    Thumb Down

    letters and/or digits

    "Entertainment is Microsoft's latest vertical to get the integrated search touch, following travel and shopping."

    English. Do you speak it?

  2. Jamie Davis
    Thumb Up

    Good good

    Anything to bring back some competition into the search engine market. Although same may say I'm being generous with the term "competition".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Myth: you cannot polish a turd

    Myth confirmed.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You CAN!

      The Mythbusters did, in fact, polish a turd!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Doro-dango

      close enough

  4. qwarty

    what about bing search?

    Bing entertainment? A little more attention to detail on basic bing search would make more sense. I've just completed a trial week with bing as default search. Poor indexing of blogspot just one of many failings in the quality of search results, far inferior to google at present IMO.

  5. conrruption

    Whatever

    Look at it this way. If you want to use Bing you have to change it... That means you have to go into the settings to find it.

    Microsoft may have a victory. A one time victory. I know how to find it easily but most people don't even know how to use texting correctly.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    move along please, no news here

    "Microsoft spends billions of $$ on bing in order to make it a bit better than it was before" - big deal.

    Now, a headline like "bing not utterly sh1t anymore" - that would be worth waking me up for.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Title

    because a search for U2's Beautiful Day pulled back an error message ......

    Well at least the twat-o-filter is working correctly....

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    poison

    Avoid Bing like the plague and be happy.

    I thought it was malware when I first saw it and have block filtered it with no regret ever since.

    fuck'em.

  9. Inachu
    Grenade

    WORTHLESS!!!!!!!

    So I try and stay away from BING. I know it is worthless but BING stooped to new lows.

    How so?

    Ok so I deal with corporate images for new pc roll out for the company I work for.

    Ok fine and dandy well those ghost images for the computer after a while get old and when you deploy these computers then they all want to do windows update... Ok I have no issue with that.

    BUT! know this...

    Before window update everything works per company specs then after window supdate then anything on our internal lan and mappings is destroyed.

    How so you ask?

    Well after the update the live search tool in IE is now replaced with BING! and

    bing can not tell the difference between a mapped internal drive on our modern AD intranet.

    So when software tries to connect to a remote interanet then the pc gets all messed up.

    The issues goes away when I make google the default search tool.

    Bing is bad! lesson learned? do not use Bing!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      The lesson is . . .

      The lesson is to keep your PC image updated instead of pushing out an old, unsafe image and having it update from MS.

      We update and test our images after every patch Tuesday at a minimum so this can't happen. But we also do not allow user computers to directly to MS for updates either, we control it internally so that we HAVE control.

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        WSUS

        It is your friend.

    2. Combat Wombat
      Headmaster

      Lesson learned

      You need to be running a WSUS update system, and test your patches properly.

      If you have a whizz bang AD system, then group policy is available for IE to prevent the use of Bing and Desktop search.

      I agree Bing is bad, but learn to Administer a network properly before you whine.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sorry.....

      But that's not stooping to new lows. Stooping to new lows is radio adverts to the CEOP "approved" version of IE8 which basically come with the unsaid tagline that if you don't download it and use it then your children will be groomed by paedophiles....

  10. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Flaff

    You can smell the desperation when you read that they bought (sic) Ryan Seacrest in to front the re-relaunch. If it was that wonderful, they wouldn't need a glitzy shindig to promote it.

    I don't understand all this gubbins that has to be tacked onto search engines now...well, I do understand, it's to guide punters towards paid-for content and to buy stuff, and then provide actual search.

    I know this isn't a very popular viewpoint, but Google seem to have got it right with a very clean and clear layout, and the bolt-on stuff like Google News and Google Images dovetails nicely with the main search. Yes, they're dominating the market, it's a virtual monopoly, and all the privacy concerns, but from a design point of view they're spot on.

    Bing and Yahoo are and always will be also-rans in the search market, but as long as there are backers who are prepared to pump in billions to pay for Z-list celebrities for the next relaunch, they won't be going away any time soon.

    Phew..that's better!

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What's the format?

    Presumably this means we are supposed to buy media from Bing.

    So, what's the format? Are they still using their WMA/WMV, or have they switched to H264?

    More importantly, if they've wrapped it in DRM, will that restrict to using it on Windows, Zune, etc. (MS products)? Or will the DRM be freely licensable and (hopefully) available on a range of competing products?

  12. Combat Wombat

    So..

    Microsoft claimed access to 1,500 shows and 20,000 TV episodes with TV listings.

    So thats 1% of Itunes?

    A search for movies produces a show times tab in Bing that presents a synopsis of local cinema listings.

    *yawn* I have my local cinema book marked.. again.. you fail bing

  13. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Is that why....

    Facebook are now plugging that you can "play games with your Facebook friends on Bing. Check out the new Bing Entertainment for games like Zuma's Revenge, Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled 2"

    That's really scraping the bottom out of the barrel.

  14. Mikel

    Microsoft Claims

    That they're flushing money down a toilet faster and more efficiently than ever before!

    Congratulations guys. You've got to aim high.

  15. Trevor_Pott Gold badge
    Megaphone

    Dear Microsoft,

    If you want a mature platform that will enable you to efficiently and effectively distribute media of all kinds onto different platforms with a proven track record and strong existing user buy in...

    ...BUY STEAM.

    Otherwise, go home.

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