Stepping Out of the Search Box | Hacker News Reader

Stepping Out of the Search Box

bing.com

29 pointsjoemir15 comments

This buzzword-infused post goes on and on about how Microsoft's "reinvention of the idea of search" meant they "stepped out of the confines of the search box," so they "needed to signal a change to the world" -- with a new Bing logo that surely cost a lot more to design than most people reading this make in a year.

For a moment I wondered, WTF?

But then I realized this kind of navel-gazing goes hand-in-hand with the new strategic 'focus' triumphantly announced by Ballmer two months ago (right before he was fired): "our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most"[1] -- that is, be everything for everyone.

Microsoft truly has lost its way.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Jul13/07-11On...

It always felt like Microsoft was chasing after markets that people are trying to leave. Bing trying to replace google search while google is desperately trying to expand their source of income by looking elsewhere while Facebook eats into their google's advertising revenue.

Which makes the last paragraph especially interesting. Insights. Have Microsoft finally figured that search doesn't have much revenue in there to milk anymore and since they have all these data they've collected at such massive scale, perhaps provide useful "interpretation" of these data? That gets me very excited.

And if the result of it all are APIs for developers to use these data, that's going to change a lot on how we make decisions, at least in the entertainment industry (which I work in).

Can you give me a concrete example on how all that data can be beneficial to the entertainment industry?

Off the top of my head, content acquisition. Which content to acquire, from which production house, with which actors, in what language, how did they do in the theatres. You can compare these indexed data with internal data, and find correlation. Netflix did them all with in house data, and they can do it because they have 114,000 years of streams every month[1]. Their dataset is large enough to pretty much represent what the general public wants. For up and coming companies, this is very helpful.

[1]http://gigaom.com/2013/09/18/building-vs-buying-how-netflix-...

This was exciting at the beginning.

"stepping out of the confines of the search box"

"reinventing search"

... what could this new search be? how will it work? is bing finally innovating and thinking for itself?

No. No.

Turns out they just designed a new logo.

Hey, man it's innovative! Just like those cool new frameworks that read JSON! And that cool stickers from Trello! Artificial intelligence that can read your mind? State of the art voice recognition? Pfft.. forget that.

Justification for new logos seem to be given by placing the logo on a grid and using straight lines to show the relationship between the elements. We see it in this blog post, and we saw it for the Yahoo logo.

Serious question: what are these grids and lines supposed to show me? One would assume there would be intrinsic motivation for the lines chosen (such as a relationship to a simple mathematical object/idea). But to me the lines always look chosen to fit the design, instead of the design fitting the lines.

For example: http://www.bing.com/blogs/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserve...

How was this angle chosen for the lines? Why three of them? The lines are parallel, but are they meant to be slightly different distances from each other? If you drew a line in the opposite direction, but aligned it to the slant of the graphic, is that 'correct'?

So they made an exact copy of Google's results? [1]

Also, isn't the new logo too similar to g drive?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/g2SOVCm.png

come on, for real?

http://oi43.tinypic.com/1ou543.jpg

The new logo's not bad, but having to explain why a logo is cool is kind of like explaining why a joke is funny...just doesn't work.

Yeah, a new logo, that's what they need.

"This was much more than just a new logo or a single brainstorm"

"The new Bing identity is more than a new logo and color palette"

Sounds like they're trying to convince themselves, telling not showing, etc.

So their conclusion is they need a new logo?

Bill Gates should come back.

Oh boy. Let's hope Microsoft digs its head out of its butt with new management at the helm.

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