Ivory Tower Thinking about Bing
June 5, 2009
I met a fellow who gave me a copy of Technology Review, the slick magazine linked mysteriously to the the bloodstream of big thinkers and the wizards at MIT. (Tip: Don’t walk barefoot in the dorms. Trash on ground. I once cut my foot.) I told the generous person, “I don’t read print magazines regularly now.” I did read the online story today “What’s Microsoft’s Bing Strategy?” here by David Talbot. The article was okay, and I found this comment interesting:
when a user searches for certain broad and popular subjects (the band U2 or a health condition like diabetes, for example), Bing will show, in addition to the usual blue links, a navigation bar on the left-hand side that breaks down the results by category. Bing decides on these subsections based on previous combinations of queries; each one links to a secondary search. In the case of U2, these categories include “images,” “songs,” “tickets,” “merchandise,” “downloads,” “interviews,” and “video.” In the case of diabetes, Bing shows results in the following categories: “articles,” “symptoms,” “diet,” “complications,” “prevention,” and “test.”
I rarely run test queries for topics that are broad or popular. I wonder if the Technology Review team runs queries for ternary nonequilibrium phase diagram. Not when reviewing Bing I learned.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2009
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