what about bing?
Posted on | September 17, 2009 | No Comments
On Wednesday (in the wee hours), I forgot to mention the inevitable comparison to Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision engine.” Why I would want Microsoft making my decisions for me, I’m not sure, but given that I use fewer and fewer Microsoft products, I may not be their target population. I switched from Outlook to Gmail exclusively for email recently, and for the most part, I used Google Docs during the grad school application process.
Anyway, the point of the Database of Intentions (Battelle points out, and I should too, that this isn’t a real thing- just a concept he named) is that the subset of the entire world’s population that’s on the internet is making the decisions for you. This was the revolution of Google: from search engines that made decisions about information to engines that used the decisions that people made to provide search results. Given this history, Bing seems to me like a step back at a time when the rest of the internet is hurtling forward.
(p.s. Thank you, WordPress, for saving this post automatically so that I didn’t lose anything when the computer I was working on suddenly shut down several minutes ago.)
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