First, Yahoo, Now Microsoft Bing: The Logo Card

September 17, 2013

I just read “Bing Gets a New Logo and Modern Design to Take on Google.” What I find fascinating is that redesign seems to be the go-to method for making it clear that a company is really serious about revenue and value for stakeholders.

The article states:

A year in the making, Bing is dropping its curly blue logo for a modern design that closely matches the rest of Microsoft’s recently redesigned product branding.

I then learned that the color is exactly the same as the color used in “Microsoft’s corporate flag logo.”

Almost as important as color is the change in mobile search. I learned:

One of the big new changes is “Page Zero,” a method to quickly provide an answer or information before a full results page. Page Zero pops up as you type in the search bar on Bing, and if you’re searching for two similarly named people then it allows you to identify the correct subject of your search before the results are listed. For certain queries you might even get news, images, or video links, and common actions like check-in will be displayed on airline queries.

In my September/October column for Information Today (one of the for-fee write ups I still do), I point out that searching for news is getting more difficult, not easier. The flashy interfaces make it difficult to:

Determine the date, time, and bibliographic details of some “hits”
Spot differences in similar stories because modern design favors cards, tiles, and sizzle over a meaty results list
Figure out why a particular “hit” appears. Results pop up which may be ads, boosted stories, or plain old false drops.

There are some other gotchas in news services as well. I am covering the problem of aliases, filtered content, and shallow back files in my upcoming ISS lecture in Washington, DC, on the 24th of September.

Without a differentiated system, I assume real journalists and many users will embrace a logo redesign. It is supposed to be working for Yahoo. Google, on the other hand, seems to be chugging along with its ad-based business model and announcing that it will bring sci-fi real time translation to the world.

One common thread unites these quite different companies: Body slam PR.

What happened to relevance?

Stephen E Arnold, September 17, 2013

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Marketing, News, Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.