Bing

Despite its aggressive (and clever) advertising campaign, I think Microsoft's new search engine, "Bing", is never going to amount to much.

Way back in the early '90s, as soon as the internet started to grow beyond AOL, people discovered that search engines were the best way to find what you wanted on the world wide web. Yahoo got in the game early, but soon Google's algorithms advanced the field of internet search by leaps and bounds. As a result, it catapulted to the top of the search engine pile, and consequently became the most visited website in the world. Despite everyone's attempts to copy or surpass it, it's held on to that top spot. Google is still the undisputed king of search, and it works perfectly for simple and obvious searches (Apple, Obama, lolcats). But once you start to search for something obscure or difficult to describe, the results start to get pretty dicey. There's definite room for improvement, and if someone can figure out how to better point people to what they're trying to find, there are millions and millions of dollars of ad revenue to be claimed.

Microsoft wants a piece of that. They claim (or at least suggest in their ads) that "Bing" will return more relevant search results than other engines. Maybe, but I doubt it. I think that until someone figures out how to make machines truly understand language like people do, search engines will always be stupid. That's just the way it is. Computers are very good at matching and very bad at making educated guesses. Whoever ends up teaching computers to truly understand the English language is going to make a billion dollars. Forget keywords and phrases. You write a short (or long) paragraph explaining exactly what you want, and the computer finds just that. I think that's the only thing that would endanger Google at this point. Actually, there are two other possibilities, but that's another topic. Check back tomorrow.