Which tube is it for Euston Station?

Microsoft this week launched a series of adverts in the UK to promote its Bing search engine, with the slogan ‘Bing and decide’. The adverts claim that we, as a people, are suffering from information overload by using other, more successful, search engines and we can’t find a simple answer to a simple question.

One of the adverts showed a woman in a train station asking a man which tube she should take for Euston Station, where the man promptly offered every piece of information relating to Euston Station… save for what she asked.

The idea of the advert is that if you use Bing, instead of say, Google, you’ll cut out all of the useless information and get straight to the nub of the matter.

But will you?

We asked Google and Bing exactly that question, which tube is it for Euston Station? (more…)

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Filed under: Google, Microsoft — Written by Carl posted on March 11, 2010 at 11:04 am

Bing turns to TV advertising to boost userbase

Less than one month since Google’s decision to advertise during the US Super Bowl was branded by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand as a desperate move following the pressure piled on by Bing, Bing is turning to TV advertising to boost its low user figures.

The TV campaign is to be shown the UK and is funded by Microsoft, hoping to lure users away from Google. The campaign will run for three months, and will cost millions to the software giant.

The campaign launches tomorrow across every terrestrial channel in the UK, and some satellite channels too, including Sky One.

The tagline Microsoft has chosen to promote its search engine with is ‘Bing and Decide’ – which presumably a lot of people have done already, which is why Microsoft has chosen to (more…)

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Filed under: Google, Microsoft — Written by Carl posted on March 9, 2010 at 10:06 am

How do I change the headlights in a 1984 Ford Escort?

Firstly, we’d like to apologise to anyone who has landed on this page looking for advice on actually changing the headlights in a 1984 Ford Escort. This article does not feature any useful tips on how to swap out your headlights, sorry. It does feature useful advice on how to find that information though – so you may wish to read on.

So, what are we talking about? We’re talking about longtail search and how the different search engines deal with requests such as this. More and more searches on the Internet these days are longtail, with people looking for specific answers to specific problems. The best search engines are the ones that offer answers to these problems, and the ones that don’t are, well, fairly useless.

With that in mind we asked Google, Yahoo and Bing the same question to see how they offered to help. We asked each search engine the following:

How do I change the headlights in a 1984 Ford Escort?

Here is what they had to say for themselves.

Yahoo took our search query, ignored the actual question part of it and just offered up websites about the Ford Escort. Websites such as (more…)

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Filed under: Google, Microsoft, Research, SEO Advice, Yahoo — Written by Carl posted on February 16, 2010 at 6:00 pm

Google is a better spellchecker than MS Word

We have come to understand that Google is a better search engine than anything Microsoft can offer. No matter how much money and publicity Microsoft throws at Bing, it’s still the results that matter and Google always comes out trumps in the results department.

However, we could be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft would have the edge in an area that it has been operating for many years longer than Google, such as with word processing.

MS Word is the industry standard for writing documents, letters, news and any form of publishing that is required. MS Word comes with its own spell checker, which some of us need more than others. Yet how many of you have tried to spell a word in MS Word, only to have a mental block and not be able to formulate the word at all?

MS Word should take over here and offer up the correct spelling, even if you’ve made a total pig’s ear of the attempt. Yet it doesn’t always. MS Word often has no answer to a badly spelt word, even though to the human eye you can see (more…)

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Filed under: Google, Microsoft — Written by Matt posted on February 14, 2010 at 8:20 am

Microsoft Internet Explorer responsible for Google Chinese hack

It emerged last week that the method used by Chinese hackers to hack into Google’s Chinese website and steal valuable information relating to human rights activists in China was IE6 (Internet Explorer 6). The heavily flawed Microsoft browser, and one that is still used by millions of people, was exploited by hackers to gain entry into Google’s website.

In reaction to the exploitation caused by IE6, the governments of France and Germany have appealed to their people to stop using the bug ridden browser. However, the British government has remained blissfully ignorant of the potential for exploitation and has stated that they will continue to use the browser themselves. Even HM armed forces are to continue to use IE6.

The Cabinet Office declared:

It doesn’t think the issue [of being open to hacking] would be resolved any better by going elsewhere.

The Germans and the French haven’t just advised against IE6, they’ve advised their citizens to stop (more…)

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Filed under: Google, Microsoft — Written by Matt posted on January 19, 2010 at 9:41 am

Millennium Bug plus ten?

Millennium Bug2009 is almost over, just another few hours to go, and with it not only ends the year, but also the decade. Today also marks the ten year anniversary that IT sceptics and scaremongers alike predicted that the Millennium Bug would disable our computer systems, shut down our hospitals and generally cause mayhem to anything electrical throughout the world.

They believed that the switching of computer calendars to a new millennium would cause untold havoc, and that companies such as Microsoft hadn’t accounted for it in their software and operating systems.

As it transpired, the year 1999 rolled over into 2000 without incident and the whole Millennium Bug thing was forgotten about. What was also forgotten about was the number of bogus IT firms who charged (more…)

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Filed under: General, Microsoft — Written by Carl posted on December 31, 2009 at 8:00 am

Bing sues Bing over name

Could they BE in any more trouble?

Chandler BingMicrosoft’s Bing is being sued by a design agency called Bing for use of the word Bing in their name. How many times can use the word Bing in a sentence before it starts to grate?

Anyhow, Bing Information Design, from Missouri, has decided to sue Microsoft for their use of the word Bing, believing they have the trademark on the name. The design agency want money from Microsoft for ‘corrective advertising’ because they believe confusion has arisen over the two names.

Bing Information Design has existed under that name since (more…)

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Filed under: Microsoft — Written by Cheryl posted on December 21, 2009 at 8:00 am

Bing crashes, not through too many users though!

Usually when a major website such as Twitter or Facebook goes down unexpectedly it’s because of a surge of user activity that has seen more people than normal attempt to access the website. Events such as the death of Michael Jackson earlier this year caused Twitter to go into meltdown for example.

On December 3rd Microsoft’s Bing suffered a 30 minute outage, but not surprisingly this wasn’t due to the hoards of users attempting to find out their daily dose of news on Bing. It was down to a ‘configuration change’ while testing.

Bing disappeared completely from the Internet on December 3rd (as we’re sure you’re aware because (more…)

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Filed under: Microsoft — Written by Matt posted on December 5, 2009 at 8:03 am
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