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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)