Tag: web

Are Bing searchers smarter than Google searchers?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

When I have Internet Explorer open, I use their embedded Search box to quickly find what I’m after.

Before I even finish typing, it’s often interesting to see what the search engines predict I’m searching for.

It’s quite an innovation to provide new web searchers with insights of what previous searchers were looking for.

Well, sometimes it’s helpful. Sometimes it’s a little worrying what gets submitted from the wisdom of crowds:

 

I have Google and Bing both available.

I thought it’d be interesting to see how they compare. Or should I say, how their respective search users compare – particularly, which side are asking dumber questions.

My comprehensive, objective analysis follows.

 

Exhibit A: What is…?

Of particular concern, Bing users asking “what is the time”. Is there any internet searching device without a visible clock? Or perhaps users know their time’s wrong, and this is the way kids today find the correct time. Or an abbreviated search to find time conversion sites? (I’m still concerned.)

Google searching overall here looks a bit like soul searching. It could be the start to the most obscure joke in history (which I don’t know the answer to):

Q: What do scientology, gypsy, love, and the illuminati have in common?

 

Exhibit B: Difference between …?

The stark difference I see is that Bing searchers look quite nerdy focusing on HD, smart phones, laptops, & economics. Googlers on the other hand are interested in food and alcohol nuances.

 

Exhibit C: Proof that…?

I found these common searches interesting. It seems people everywhere put their searches of the world wide web of information to good use, seeking proof of God and Jesus. In addition to this, Googlers seem to cast a wider net than Bing users to check on not only aliens and ghosts, but also vampires and mermaids.

And Google is suggesting that many people are still researching whether news of rapper Tupac’s death is greatly exaggerated or not. On this point, it seems there’s a glass half-full / half-empty thing going on. Surprisingly, the most popular “proof that” search overall is whether Tupac is alive. Then even more surprisingly, also in the list in sixth place is the query for “proof that tupac is dead”

 

Conclusion:

I think the analysis is inconclusive to say whether one group of search users are smarter than the other – dangit.

However, it does seems to me Googlers are asking a greater variety of interesting questions.

If I find any other interesting search suggestions in my travels I’ll post some more.

 

An update:
It’s interesting, and by total coincidence, just today The New York Times tweeted a link to an article they published on Bing/Google web search auto complete / auto suggest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/technology/in-search-engine-results-a-peek-at-what-we-wonder.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

More than a Facebook status

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I was at a meeting recently where someone asked the dozen attendees how many used Twitter. Only my friend and I raised our hands. The lady shared she was at a loss why people tweet. In her words, it’s no different to Facebook status updates, only less.

It made me think back a little over a year ago. Because at that time, I had similar thoughts. I’ve overcome that though, and would now consider myself an avid Tweeter.

The query though was a good prompt for me to think and clarify what I think it is that makes Twitter more than a Facebook status:

  • I love the potential of exchange beyond my primary network of friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances. Twitter is for the most part a completely open dialogue. This is a dialogue worth having, when there are so many interesting people from all over the world, and all walks of life. Some say Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you’re honest to strangers.
  • News is updated on Twitter before any other source (news of an earthquake allegedly spreads faster than the seismic event itself). By following Trending Topics, you can catch the latest buzz about events before traditional sources even pick them up. The pace of updates might be due to the initial 140 character limit. Fewer words give fewer opportunities to deliberate.
  • Due to its free form, amazingly simple interface, and 140 character limit, Twitter encourages a special amount of creativity to keep the communication going, and the craftiness of language to keep the message succinct.
  • Twitter has become a powerful direct channel for individuals and organisations to spread their message. If there are celebrities, experts, or companies interesting enough for you to follow them, Twitter allows you to follow them – so to speak. Celebrities especially are finding it a useful way to share info directly with their fans – without filter.
  • And I like the real-time feedback and collaboration that Twitter can enable during events through publishing a #(hash) tag. These tags when included in a tweet act as an anchor for anybody to add to the conversation.
  • Your Twitter feed is also like a water tap that you can switch on whenever you want to quench your thirst. There is no cup overfilling that you need to get through before it gets stagnant – like an unmanned email inbox.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all positive. I think for the most part, Twitter is filled with rubbish. Duue to this, I rarely recommend people to get online with it.

It can be an amazing resource if you do have the right temperament, and thirst for knowledge, and ability to find things that entertain you.

New media is more of the same

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I found the following article from The Economist interesting.

The End of Mass Media: Coming Full Circle, http://www.economist.com/node/18904158

It describes the current emphasis on social media as not being new. We tend to think the connected have evolved for the better on account of the advances and innovative paradigms of web 2.0 technologies. If we stretch the time scale though, we’re actually not dragging society to a fresh citizen centric model. This “new” power to the people is actually returning us to a formerly prominent model.

Power to the people, just as we were hundreds of years ago.

The formal media establishments were the misnomer – perhaps we were just in the eye of the cyclone.

Google suggestions

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Prolific Tweeter @Stephen Fry tweeted a link to the Google Blacklist. It’s supposedly a list of words where Google does not suggest the rest of the search in order to avoid offending anybody.  It relates to Google Instant which works by anticipating your search as you type each letter and giving the remainder of potential phrases to you as a possible link.  From processing 400 million queries per day, it usually has a pretty good idea of what you could be after.

Going through the list is slightly amusing.  But perhaps it’s more alarming how much time people have devoted to searching on rude words to work out if Google will keep quiet on the subject matter or not.

I thought it was interesting to also see Google take quite an innocent search into a totally inappropriate direction.
 
Earlier in the week I wanted to know if hummus (the Middle Eastern chick pea foodstuff) was healthy.  That was before I knew how to spell hummus.
 
Typing just “Is homo” to search on threw up 10 queries about homosexuality I never considered.

Some time ago I also found that typing a simple “How to” into Google would have some strange suggestions around -making babies -french kiss, and so on.. but checking this out now, it seems they’ve vetted the suggestions more sensibly.

The lucrative Australian accent

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The majority of web advertisements are boring. But every now and again one captures my interest – usually for the wrong reasons.

This happened just now, when I was enlightened about a programme to learn how to speak with an Australian accent to help with job prospects. Being an Australian myself, perhaps I could pick it up quicker than the 15 minutes per day they suggest it requires.

Don’t let your accent hold you back, get the job, salary and the recognition that you deserve.

It’s interesting, I thought the Australian accent could have the same issues.

http://www.speakmoreclearly.com/australianaccent?gclid=CMKeocullqICFQceZwodYGeNFg

The internet is making us dumb

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve heard people claiming that with the internet we’re growing dumb by having such a plethora of information at our finger tips. I never bought much into the argument, but maybe it does have some merit, particularly when the information that is closest to our finger tips is wrong.

I’m delivering a presentation today to the CPI software congress. Yesterday I showed a colleague the content, and mentioned the segways I had in mind – referring to the way I would try to transition the content through different slides. He looked at me puzzled, and asked what a two wheel device for getting around the airport had to do with anything. Despite being British, he was only slightly joking. He had not heard the word Segway used in its proper context, only from a product perspective – with particular highlights such as when George W. Bush fell off one.

I suggested he look up the proper meaning. We didn’t have a dictionary at hand, so Google had to do. I was gob-smacked with what came back.

Of a dozen or so references Google sent to his Blackberry; and particularly when you use the dictionary function of define: segway, there was no mention of it actually being a word. Nope. A segway according to the leading definitions on the web is a:

A large update: I’ve traced the etymology of the term, and embarassingly found using the word segway in the context above comes from the Trade Marked product name – Segway.

The internet is not making us dumb, I was dumb to start with. The internet can only help.

An even bigger, and more important update:
Thanks to Tim, I’ve learned the word in question is segue. Which is a real, non-trademarkable word.

The Internet may not change the fact we are dumb, but it does have the benefit of exchange with smarter people.
🙂

Proving I’m human

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I have recently subscribed to Twitter – @rbrink77.

I believe I’ve embraced web 2.0 and social networking for a few years now, but Twitter has never appealed to me. But I should try before I refuse to buy.

I guess not having a Blackberry or sophisticated mobile phone puts me at a slight disadvantage. In fact, my mobile could not be less sophisticated. It has no Bluetooth, and I can’t even change the ring tone. Despite this it serves me extremely well, through surviving my 20 month old’s battering and attempts to eat it.

I have noticed some Twitter feeds use Captcha to ensure the subscription is coming from a human. One of the tweets I subscribed to took this to an interesting level, with its Captcha. I’ve uploaded the screen shot below. If you can’t make out the images, the two words are “bootee secretary”.

Actual Captcha image

Black and Gold Ball – 22 April 2010

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Elle & I, and a few tables of friends attended this year’s Black and Gold Ball held at the Grand Hyatt. It’s an important Dubai institution around ANZAC day for particularly all expats that hail from Australia and New Zealand. Our mob demonstrated the laziness of Australians and Kiwis when I think back to how we came together and bought tickets. All communications were over email, instituted and purchased between a Brit and a Papua New Guinean.

The ball’s title should be obvious to those from the Tasman. No, they don’t supply weird mixed drinks of Guinness and mid-strength XXXX. For anyone stuck, Black relates to the All Blacks the world champion rugby team, and the Gold is one half of Green and Gold – the proud colours of Australia, world champions in most other sports ;-).

Despite the effects of the financial crisis, and people allegedly leaving the region in droves, the ball continues to grow each year. This year saw 600 people in total, up from 450 the year before. All attendees were also quite generous. Around AED 30,000 was raised for charity during the night.

In one short sentence, the night was fantastic. After paying respect to those ‘who shall not grow old’, there was quite a long speech by organiser, Graham McNally. I heard on the grape vine that Graham completed almost the whole organisation of the evening himself – which if true is outstanding. He tried his hand at some humour, and made me chuckle at a few standard Oz and Kiwi jokes I’d heard before. And yes, having AUS and NZ the focal point of a ball, he felt it was necessary to mention “that” delivery. I believe the subject was changed pretty swiftly after to take the piss out of South Africans.

They played one party game our British friends forewarned us about called head and bums. Since playing the game at last year’s ball also, they have been of the belief it was a common Australian pastime. If you’re unaware of the game – which we were – it’s really simple. Everyone stands and chooses whether to put their hands on their head or on their bum. The announcer chooses one of the options, and if you chose correctly you remain standing to play another round. We were quite hopeless. In fact the only person from our entire table who did well was Bob our resident Scotsman. He made it just about to the round where those remaining in the game move to the dance floor to find the eventual winner. But unfortunately he followed the advice of someone from our table, and chose to put his hands on the option which had more hair. I’ll leave it at that. He was very smartly dressed in a tuxedo and kilt, we didn’t want to go any further.

The Aus/NZ inspired menu and specially imported food was tremendous – although two friends claimed to have inconvenient issues after some oysters. Eating high quality lamb from home was one of the highlights of the night.

The night was like all the balls I’ve been to. There was great company all looking very spectacular, great food and drinks, a real reluctance to get onto the dance floor but once there we danced the night away. Lionel Ritchie’s song All Night Long got us singing more than we ordinarily would when it sounded like the lyrics included a local suburb:

We’re going to Party, Karama, Fiesta, forever, Come on and sing along.

Toward the end of the night it was a mystery where the whole night had gone. When the ugly lights came on to encourage us to leave, we could not believe it was after 3am.

Actually this ball had a few significant differences from the balls I attended previously. Those in years gone by were safely held before the onset of social networking, 3 megapixal Blackberries with WiFi connection, and inconspicuously sized digital cameras with HighDef video recording. This ball, and every moment for ever more is open to the gazes of the web’s population. It was interesting to know that photos of our escapades were getting uploaded to Facebook in near real time.

When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t recap on the night by reading Facebook status updates. I watched an edited video megamix of myself making some terrible dance moves. What ever happened to ‘what happens on tour…”

Unfortunately one thing that wasn’t caught on film was one of the highlights toward the end of the night. We heard The Proclaimer’s, 500 Miles and insisted on getting our other Scottish friend up to dance with us – knowing full well how much she hates the song. Good times.

Bengali Matrimony.com

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With such a large Indian presence in Dubai, a lot of the online news for the area have links to Indian ads.  One that got my attention this morning was the Bengali Matrimony web site, http://www.bengalimatrimony.com/

It’s mostly the same as what (I assume) you’d expect on an online dating site back home.  It has a few differences though.  It seems to have a pretty comprehensive search on religion, region and language – I guess as India’s such a large, populous and diverse place.

But I thought the face search was most interesting
(http://profile.bengalimatrimony.com/search/smartphotoform.php).

What it does is allow you to return all the prospective brides that have a facial similarity to your chosen Bollywood actress. Woohoo!

It seemed a bit hit and miss from my trial of this (for purely research purposes obviously), but obviously worth a try.

Journalistic integrity

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Yet another one.

Student’s Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspaper obituaries – The Irish Times – Wed, May 06, 2009

A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.

 

 

(19/06/2017 Addendum: It’s interesting to see these kind of posts, clearly before I began using Twitter to share tidbits of information I found interesting.)