Microsoft 'personalizes' Bing search results Microsoft is now "personalizing" searches on Bing, tailoring results to the user's particular location and search history. Previously, according to a blog post from Microsoft, the company has run limited tests involving personalized Bing results, but this is the first time it has rolled out personalized results to everyone on …
Why would I want a search engine that shows me only the type of stuff I've seen already?
It's like those personal ads seeking "a like-minded person". What would you learn from someone who's "like-minded"?
With such search engines, perhaps the internet really will create a world of contented, unambitious zombies, never desiring a world beyond that which they know.
I am in Christchurch New Zealand.
I go to bing.com. Type "library". On the five pages of results I don't get a single library site in NZ - some from Oz though.
I go to google and do the same. The whole first page is NZ libraries and the Christchurch library up near the top. I also get a map showing the location of all the libraries in Christchurch.
Using pizza as the search pretty much gives the same experience: bing -> random crap none in the town I'm in, google -> pizza joints (+map) in Christchurch.
Bing gave me absolutely nothing worth clicking on and hence no ad revenue for them. Google gives me a regular click-fest.
Considering how little traffic bing gets they could probably have a human sitting there doing the actual searching for you.
bing really need to do better if they want to get punters, particularly in mobile space. The whole point of mobile search is to give people context aware info to satisfy an immediate need. If bing can't do that then WP7 is not going to be very useful.
If this works in Seattle then I suspect it is rigged and hand-tuned just for the Seattle area so Ballmer can find pizza on his way home. Humans being used to do a job that a proper search engine should be able to do on its own. A reverse Turing test if you will.
Ah, the good old days. When location based services forever returned the addresses of the pizza places in Murray Hill, or Naperville, or Maitland. Totally useless for me in Atlanta*.
Years later I got to visit the one in Murray Hill...and the pizza was excellent.
They think they are cute and Johnny-on-the-Spot. I would NEVER want some search engine only showing my past. In real life, things change. Why would anyone stupidly want to create a web search engine that won't show differences?
Hey, Google programmers: here's a tip: Split the page VIEW to show "Your common reminder/refresher-like searches" and "Possibly relevant searches" with connector lines of varying thicknesses, sort of like a mindmap."
Google's unwanted absorption of all my details in order to pin me down and push me down a particular pathway was bad enough....now Bing, which I had more faith in, is taking the same route.
Perhaps I want to use the web to learn things, see NEW sites (and sights) and explore. Whatever happened to 'surfing' the web?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
