I like Chrome and it's simplicity, and hope they keep it that way.
IE and Opera clunk along like skips on square wheels. And The World is ok, but is just a re-packaging of IE, but that probably means its less clunky
I admit my Firefox installation is now a heavyweight with so many options that no-one but me can understand all the options - but I live in it like a second home.
Chrome is the little sports car I take out at the weekends for fun
Searching is taking on a new look at things as Bing launches Visual Search to differentiate it from the others - which will of course copy it.
Allowing users to search with pictures rather than text, at the moment only a small number of topics will return a visual display. These centre around popular categories like entertainment, famous people, shopping and sports.
Unfortunately, the original link given for the Beta test version of this option appears to have evaporated, and I don't see any mention of an alternative address or means of accessing it, so you'll just have to look around for it yourself, and keep an eye out for any news:
We’ll be expanding the Visual Search experience over the coming months, so make sure to check back often and explore the Visual Search beta yourself at: http://www.bing.com/visualsearch and let us know what you think.
Even though I'm doing all I can, and never use Google search (since I have no interest in merely finding what the sheep have found) unless I come up empty elsewhere, which is actually a very rare occurrence, it seems that my efforts are not enough to keep the alternatives happy
Microsoft's relaunched search engine has received a disproportionate amount of attention in recent months - not least because journalists are desperate to cover every cranny of its conflict with Google - but it turns out that Bing may not be the thing. According to figures from StatCounter, Bing saw its share of the search market decline in September - down to 3.25% of global searches from 3.58%. Yahoo was also down, to 4.37%, while Google rose to an astonishing 90.54% of all search traffic worldwide.
Bing's struggles come alongside more bad news for Bill Gates. According to the new Forbes rich list released this week, Gates remains America's richest man - despite losing $7bn ($7bn!) over the past year. Other technological tycoons Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen all figure in the top 25 (of course, the vast majority of their wealth is tied up in shares, so it's a paper fortune - and a paper loss too).
I put Johnstone Castle into Bing the other day and got the usual range of rubbish which had to be searched through to find useful information. Since my FF comes with Google I did the same there and it found the nuggets and a set of pics. I don't know how much of this is down to FF.
It's down to Google - it's bots crawl the web and ferret away info all the time.
Simple credit where credit's due, and Google's bots simply do a better job and are more up to date than the others.
But I tried Bing and my own favourite for Johnstone Castle (with nothing else added) and they came up with much the same as Google in the top ten or so - that said, as the bots crawl and the master database is updated, you can get a completely different set of results a few minutes after getting nothing at all, or rubbish after noting some gems.
I've fallen for the latter, and paid the price of lost time by not noting something rare as it was found, and then being unable to find the same thing half and hour later.
Isn't it nice to know that Google is reading this forum, and paying attention to The Fox's appeals for ways to reduce the number of irrelevant results?
The new options - nine in total - are hidden in the left sidebar and allow users to filter results by the past hour or a specific date range; they can be specified to look only within blogs or for reviews; and enable the user increase or decrease the number of shopping sites they get in the results. Up till now the search results could only be reduced to news, images, videos or certain languages.
...
On Monday, Google announced that it was adding its "Hot Trends" feature to its main page search, allowing users to see how popular their search is at any given hour. Now, when you search Google and your query matches one of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms, it shows you a graph at the bottom of page, with more information – like how popular the query is, how fast it's rising over time, and other useful data.
Google's new search is another setback for Microsoft's search engine Bing, which still delivers better image results, but doesn't allow you to refine your search results in the same interface. Bing recently faced its first monthly decline as its share fell to 3.25%. Google globally has a quasi-monopoly with a market "share" of 90.54%.
DAMN!!!
I may actually have to start using Google searches if they carry on like this.
I wouldn't read anything into Bing grabbing market share - Microsoft have stuffed it into !E7 in place of Google. Most people like me just use the one provided.
Live Search was always Microsoft, rebranded recently as Bing, so they can't really be accused of "stuffing" it into their own browser since it is their own tool
Since Google is competition, it not true to say they stuff Bing in in place of it.
I find it, and Yahoo! a particular nuisance, as many software writers bundle it in with the "free" software, and if you don't vet the installation, you have the damn things polluting your screen space and removing a whole row's worth of real estate that can be much better utilised for displaying what you actually want to see.
Not to mention the hassle of having to run an uninstallation routine to get rid of the useless things as well
Did you know that if you click a search from those installed searchboxes in the browsers, rather than manually navigating to the search site's own page, the browser owner gets paid each time you make a search?
I used to have a Google box in the top right which came with XP. It was changed in an update becoming Live search and then Bing in another revision. I didn't choose this, it was foisted upon me.
I didn't know about the payments not that it makes any difference to me. There seem to be a lot of mysterious payments on the web. I don't understand where they all come from as BB users only pay a flat rate monthly.
I was curious, I don't see IE very often now but I see I have already edited to use Clusty, so I've no idea what might have been there before.
Firefox has a search box in the same place, but mine now has a dropdown with all my selected searches in it for quick selection, and is further modded to revert to Clusty if not used for 60 seconds, and to clear itself of the last search string - something that used to irritate intensely if I started typing something, and it tacked itself onto the end of the previous search text.
The payments are sponsored by the search engine provider, and paid to the browser creator, so that would be eg from Google to Mozilla.
Strange world isn't it? Considering that MS had highjacked my old computer, junked the Google searchbox in favour of Bing without asking me, I was rather surprised that a new replacement came with a Google searchbox top right as well as a Google tool bar with another searchbox. Bit of overkill I would say. The toolbar was the first thing to go.
If you choose to use the Internet Explorer Browser and allow the updates and fixes to be installed automatically each month, then Bing is installed as part of their software.
I don't allow the updates to install themselves without my say-so.
I'm not sure where the setting is, but it should be fairly easy to set up of you have a look for "Automatic updates" in IE.
In there, there is the Automatic Update, which downloads and install all the updates automatically for you, and is the MS recommended option - as you would expect.
Below this is the option for Automatic Downloading of the updates, but which excludes the automatic installation. This will alert you when the updates are ready, but does not install them untill you vet the list, and select the ones you want, and deselect the ones you don't.
I use this because there are quite a few large for MS applications I don't, and will never use, so there's no point in me bogging things down with the files which I don't need, so save space.
The thing to watch for is reputable, free softeware - if you take advantage of it.
I do, and the authors supplement their benevolence by including things like the Google toolbar (as I'm sure do PC makers) and if you are not careful and read each step of the install/setup of new softeare or PCs, you can find all sorts of free things you might not want.
By coincidence, I recently found I too had the Google toolbar - which is a worthless waste of screen space - after upgrading a software package.
It's reputable stuff, so not a problem as it's only a few clicks to dump it, but it served to remind to read those install screens and options, even those I have been using for years. One of the even gave me 50 free MP3 downloads - again, all reputable, but all rubbish too, simply because I hadn;t paid attention. I now select the upgrade option that doesn't even include these each time.
My point really is the inconsistency of Bing with an update and loads of Google with a new machine. I suppose the machine might have been lying about for a while since it is Vista.
You would have thought that a fairly silly and relatively innocuous name choice such as Bing! would have been fairly safe, and that Microsoft would have been spared the usual parade of hangers-on, but when your coffers are as large as Microsoft's, then you can expect any little player that sees the prospect of a few million being awarded to them by a court, then no matter how tenuous the claim, it must make some sense to after the big player...
They're not serious, because of the really were, then why aren't they also announcing that they are suing each other, since their various claims that Microsoft is infringing their use of the Bing! name must be equally true for the case between each of the parties which is suing Microsoft.
Or are they only interested in chasing the potential payout - which none of them would be worth if they did sue one another.
I wasn't going to bother about this one, then I noticed one of the early comments:
Quoted Text
While I haven't noticed any real-time results (which, I suppose, is kind of the point), the reason seems simple enough for me: they're displayed up there in that junk area that daily use of search engines has trained me to ignore.
You know, that block up top where sponsored results, shopping links and other such spammy fluff that I haven't asked for lives, and which I automatically skip over to get to the information I actually wanted.
It seems odd to me that the supposedly clever researchers appear to have taken this fairly obvious point into account.
I, for one, never look at sponsored results - I'm simply not interested in any link that someone had paid to have pushed up the listing, for the same reason I am not interested in anyone who cold calls my phone or home, and throw out on there ear.
The article seems to reinforce my belief that folk in advertising have some sort of misguided belief that people actually want to pay for and be subjected to their tripe:
It reminded of another article I read only this morning, where I was basically being accused of being a "Bad Person" for using adblckers, and that I was a thief for doing so.
Well, all I have to say in response to the accusations is that I am now a "Worse than Bad Person" - the first thing I did after reading it was go and turn up the metaphorical "wick" on my adblockers and Flash-blockers so they would be even more rigorous that they were before.
The web advertisers crossed the line many years ago, and have only themselves to blame for the popularity of blocking.
Had they not embarked on campaigns of flashy, animated, hypnotic, which (despite their remonstrations to the contrary) are intended to do one thing - draw the readers' eye to them, then blokers would not have become so popular. Same goes for popup windows that suddenly appear than lay themselves over content you are trying to read.
There used to be an unwritten rule among web designers, that the marquee, or self-scrolling text was not "a good thing" and would be ignored. It's seldom seen.
However, even reputable sites are now wasting their own design by employing continuously scrolling "tickers", incessantly showing the latest additions or items on the site - and the worst of these (like most Flas-based adverts) don't have a Stop or Cancel button to make then go away.
Thank goodness Firefox has an addon that gives you a button than can be clicked on ANYTHING on the screen to make ot go away
It looks as if the ad-blocking story might rumble on for a bit - with the people who are involved in ads trying to threaten ad-block users with promises that the loss of revenue from pages with blocked ads will lead to the sites closing down.
In a pig's ear!
I'd like to see their bluff called, and one of the options listed in the following article put into place, namely that the sites publish at the foot of their pages an independently audited (and it HAS to be independently audited, because I don't believe anything an advertiser claim about adverts) summary of the ads blocked, the lost revenue, and a list of articles that the site couldn't publish because it was skint. I suspect this would differ wildy from a non-audited version of the same story.
More seriously, the comments show that folk are reasonable, and while they generally come out against ads, the underlying message is not the principle of the ads, but the their dreadful appearance and tactics:
Quoted Text
I work for a digital advertising agency. Along with microsites, iPhone apps and long-form digital content, I make banners. And I use Adblock Plus. This is because most advertising, online or otherwise, is utter crap. And banners contain some of the worst of the crap. Flickering, squirming, farting, buzzing crap.
I suggest publishers who can, institute aesthetic standards. Try running a garish, badly designed ad for Admiral car insurance in the pages of Vogue Italia. They'd laugh at you. [The Guardian] could insist on what we in the business call "standard" (non-moving) banners. They could insist on a color palette, type size and a number of other standards. This would reduce "cut through" but it might persuade a savvy, ad-blocking audience to whitelist this excellent website.
That sums it it for me, and the first para describes the problem, while the second provides a reasonable solution - ads that advertise, rather than try and win a prized for being eye-catching at the expense of the real page content.
There is a problem though, in that the ad-blocker is now amongst the most widely downloaded add-ons - it may be too late to counter that, even by self-regulating and adopting ads that advertise, rather than ads that irritate.
For example, on one well-known mapping site, I arrived on the page (not using Firefox) to be greeted with the map, an ad-banner along the top, and a number of slots around it that were presumably supposed to have random ads inserted on each page view. Instead, Orange had fiddles something to make their ad fill every space, so I had the banner and six versions of the same phone ad whizzing non-stop around the map I wanted to see. And just for good measure, Orange had disable the option to stop the flash movie playing, so I couldn't stop the animation whizzing their stupid phone along the banner, or around the slots - my eye simply could not hold on the map without being draw away to the movement - advertisers deny they do this, and that the animation its there to look pretty. Down folks! There goes another flying pig!!
The most interesting reflection in the article is that, once again, and established industry can be seen merely to be trying to use old ideas and practices in the new territory of the web, and being thwarted, and trying to use old methods of coercion to get around this, rather than trying to move with the new technology, and coming up with something new and better.
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