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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Logo is well and truly terrible. It communicates nothing and belongs on a the sign of a crappy downtown bistro than a professional web app.

Functionally it's disappointing. The context and use case-sensitive thing that is hinted at in the preview video seems almost entirely absent. The preview vid suggested that they will aggregate hotel information, flight information, etc, to create a grander unified experience - I have not seen any of this. Searching for hotels in a city doesn't give me anything except your traditional search results.

The categories are well thought out - but undifferentiated from Google's search term suggestions as it is.

Sadly, this launch seems a bit like the cuil launch - functionally incomplete, but in the web world you really only get one launch.

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Ok.. i'll bite... what's so spectacular about the Google logo?

For me, the irritation is the panther thingy in the background on search results. It just looks like someone with no design sense found some clip art and decided to put it there.

I didn't understand your comment until I enabled Javascript for the occasion and found that they use photos. And corny ones, too; I'm looking at "Hot air ballons over Cappadocia" (I still don't get the "panther thingy"; maybe because I'm in Germany). Makes no sense at all to me - why would they want to do that?

Ah. In the UK we get a crappy clipart snow leopard. Looks terrible.

I'm actually thinking there's room there to make UI improvements that would benefit the user.

For example, with the live id and being logged in, I think it would be neat if these background images eventually ended up being something relevant to me rather than something generic.

Right now, there is definitely room for improvement, but I wouldn't say it's downright bad.

It's not spectacular - but (to me anyway) it communicates a cutesy friendliness - the squiggly fonts and child-like primary colors gives a sense of invitation to poke and pry at the system's abilities, and also conveys a sense of wonder.

The bing logo, on the other hand... the font is poorly chosen, IMHO the kerning is all wrong, it feels like something one would whip up in 10 minutes in Paint, not a professional logo. Furthermore, the choices of font gives me the feeling that they're trying to position this thing as hip and cool (hence the bistro comment), where the system is, as of yet, deserving of none such accolades.

Microsoft's cash coffers give it a few exceptions to the "only one launch" rule. Cuil's total funding of $33M (crunchbase) is a third of Microsoft's marketing budget for Bing.

yeah, noone has ever made "release early, update often" work on the web...

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