Though I am not a diehard Google fan, I usually use Google whenever I need to search for something, and I take advantage of a few of the services they offer like Gmail and their online calendar. Lately though, I've been a bit intrigued with Microsoft's revamped Live Search, Bing. I've been frequently jumping back and forth between Google and Bing to compare search results, especially when I have trouble finding something.
So far, I've been pretty impressed with Bing - it almost always returns just about everything I would find on Google, and the image and video search function on Bing is actually a cut above those found on Google. And though I do enjoy the simplicity of the Google landing page, which is one of the reasons why I think it became so popular in the first place, I do find myself drawn to the Bing landing as well; they almost always have a beautiful image on display, and the fact boxes you can mouse over are usually interesting.
Bing has been running a contest over the last few weeks, in order to help them find a jingle for the site. The contest simply asked people to record their idea for a jingle, and then submit it to the Bing YouTube page, where the winner would be chosen based on number of views and quality of rating.
The winner was crowned yesterday, and while the video is odd and slightly disturbing, I have to admit - the song is kind of catchy. Catchy in the way that the simple tune gets stuck in your head for about an hour after viewing. Behold the winning video:
The winner, Jonathan Mann, has been creating (and posting on YouTube) a song a day, and the video he submitted to the Bing jingle contest was his 202nd creation. Sure, it's decidedly awful, but isn't that pretty much what's expected from contests like this? Isn't being awful a prerequisite for running a viral internet campaign?
Anyway, I got a kick out of it. And almost as big of a kick out of the sourpuss people posting about how terrible it is directly on the Bing blog. It's pretty easy to pick out the people who are seemingly just mad that Bing isn't the pile of garbage they hoped it would be. But their comments are funny, nonetheless.
Also, I'm happy to report that Twitter has been down for hours now. Apparently, it was taken out by hackers early this morning. Let's hope it stays down.
Update: It looks like it's tentatively back up now. The world has its largest collection of useless information back again.
7 Comments
The thing that pisses me off about bing the most is the logo. Its stretched beyond decent proportions (http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/bing_sets_new_record_in_horizo.php) and because of that it looks so ameteur and wrong every time they slap it somewhere. I can’t bear to look at it, and I don’t know how it slipped past microsoft’s art department.
As a designer myself, and someone who currently works on product packaging and advertisement pieces almost every day, I respectfully disagree with you (and your link), SunnyKatt. There’s nothing particularly amateurish about scaling a font, especially for a logo. In fact, I would argue that it’s more of an amateur move not to; by changing the typeface slightly, they ensured that their site’s logo has a unique look to it. They took a familiar font and made it their own. Wouldn’t you find it horribly generic to just take a simple font, type out “bing”, and call that a finished logo?
I see your point. Scaling, I guess, is a nice way to add your own look on a font. But instead I think they should have customized the font shape itself rather than scaled it. The way it is stretched looked really hideous to me – it looks like someone gently compressed it like they would a thigh master.
It has its interesting aspects, but for some reason I just can’t bring myself away from Google. The over-simplicity of Google is just too much to let go of.
On the issue of the text stretching, it seems like they primarily did it in order to separate the logo from the text on the screen. And when you are looking at the text page previews (very, very nifty) there can be a lot of text on the screen, but the logo always looks like a logo.
Microsoft Bing would be the closet competitor of Google. but i still use Google because it shows more relevant results on the serp.
i have been evaluating the search results of Microsoft Bing compared to Google and they are comparable. Bing gives almost the same relevant search results just like Google.
Bing search engine gives almost the same search results as Google. Looks like Google will now have a tough competition when it comes to search engine technology.