The Switch

The practical switch was much easier than the psychological switch. I set the home page and default search engine to Bing and with a couple of clicks I was set. Nevertheless Google has been my unthinking default since the late 90s. Opening a browser window and seeing something other than the multicolored logo and search box, over a white background felt weird for the first week. The Bing homepage is a testament to good content presentation. Most of the screen is dominated by a large, high-res image of some usually random, interesting thing. Today it was a hanging monastery in China and it changes daily. Directly below it is a footer with links related to the main image followed by breaking news and trending topics. To the left are links to the now traditional image, video, shopping, news, maps and travel searches, directly under the Bing logo and search box. There’s a bunch of other navigation pieces but they’re all well tucked-away in their respective areas.

The Search

First thing I noticed after the switch is that I seldom use search engines. I’ve been on the internet so long that I usually know exactly where to go for most pieces of information, leaving the search box as a last resort when my usual sources fail me (they usually don’t). The times I did have to rely on Bing for finding information it shone very brightly. The search results screen innovates very little but in case you need it there’s tons more meta-data about your search than a Google result usually brings. Searching the Beatles for example produced the same basic set of results: beatles.com, the Beatles Wikipedia entry, lyrics, fan pages, etc. Bing’s results were organized with subsections such as Beatles Songs, Beatles Lyrics, Beatles Albums, etc. Each sub-category was represented on a new navigation in the left side column over related searches and my recent search history. Each result entry had additional hover-over functionality with content preview and some links from the site’s internal navigation. Images were displayed on top of the main results and video results at the bottom of the page.

The Experience

Microsoft is evidently putting a lot of importance into making this the best search solution. Every results page comes with a feedback button locked to the bottom right of the window where you can rate and comment the results of your search as well as the general Bing experience. The entire experience is very dynamic, ajaxy and generally Web 2.0. Everything that can be done asynchronously is done asynchronously. Hover over an image and a larger preview image comes up as a tooltip with some of the image’s metadata, it’s source, a feedback link and a similar images link (this feature works particularly well). Hover over a video thumb and a preview starts playing right there with sound and all. All searches can be refined. Images can be refined by size, proportions, color, style, and people. This last refinement is particularly cool as it lets you search for faces, upper body or images with no people at all. These tools are very powerful letting a user find some very specific results with just a few clicks, like this page that includes only Wallpaper sized images of red Ferraris on plain backgrounds. Sure, the further you go down the more blue and black Ferraris slip in as well as other backdrops, but the first couple dozen images fit my search perfectly and most of the times you just need one good red Ferrari.

The Conclusion

My relationship with Google as my homepage has been long and fruitful, but I think I’ve finally found a real contender for this space. I’m going to stick with Bing for the foreseeable future and I’m glad that I decided to give it a chance. It’s about time Microsoft put some real effort into it’s search division. True, it copies all the best that Google has to offer, but copying the competition is nothing new for Microsoft, and at least this time they’ve managed to provide a better product with considerable differences that really put it a good couple of feet ahead of the pack.

• You make your own stations.
• You get to rate the music you hear and they swear they will never play again music you dislike.
• Songs are played by a suggestion system based on songs you gave thumbs up to.

This rating system is the backbone of Pandora where; they ambitiously called it “The Music Genome Project” upon launch.

We are fans of Pandora, we use it everyday during work, in the car, and socially hosting guests; therefore I excuse Pandora thinking I am gay. It has recently suggested the following songs one following the other:

• Lola by The Kinks
• Get Back by The Beatles
• Rocket Man by Elton John
• Age of Aquarius by 5th Dimension

Maybe I’m reading too much into this but those are two songs about transvestites, one from a gay artist, and a piece from a very colorful musical. I love all these songs exept for Age of Aquarius which I gave thumbs down to and thankfully will never have to hear again (through Pandora). And thruthfully if it keeps playing songs like these, I’m fine with it thinking I’m gay.

As web standards have changed, browsers gotten better and people’s interactions with the internet become something else entirely; 20% of Internet users insist in keeping an 8 year old browser. Do you remember what websites were like 8 years ago? Here’s Microsoft’s own from the Wayback Machine’s archive. No video, no Javascript, no CSS, basically nothing of what makes a modern site.

As developers we have to work, often tens of hours longer, to replicate the experience that works on every other browser, on IE6. And it’s not just us, here at ML. The development community has had to create workarounds and exceptions to mold our carefully designed product to IE6’s shortcomings, and lack of W3 standards compliance.

With that in mind we are ecstatic that Google decided to raise the visibility of our cause by marking IE6 as an unsupported browser for Gmail and various other Google products, and recommending instead many other free options that will better serve the user. Sure they might have ulterior motives, such as advertising their own Chrome browser, but by coming out against this seriously outdated program they help to raise the industry as a whole.

We have not followed Google’s route in that we will continue to support IE6 as long as it is used by more than 15% of Internet users, but we would like you to help us in our plight by dropping this antiquated relic and upgrading to some of the various (much better) options available in the market. Even more, here are some links to help get you started:

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 8

Yeah, you guys read that last one right, IE is up to its eighth version, which is leaps and bounds better than its predecessors.

So there you are, links, options and all. If you’d like a recommendation, personally I like Firefox and Chrome for the PC, Firefox for the Mac and Linux, and Opera 9.5 beta for my phone. You no longer have an excuse, upgrade today.

EDIT: IE6 finally has dropped below 15% and we have stopped supporting it for regular projects. We will nevertheless keep supporting IE6 in projects that specifically require it for an additional fee.

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

Ok, so example-wise:

1. When I finish writing this blog post, my RSS feed will be updated. You can view the updated feed here.
2. This in turn will update the people subscribed to the feed.
3. There are many ways of subscribing to feeds the most common ones include: Outlook or other email clients, web browsers, Apple widgets, Windows gadgets, online applications, and even mobile phones.

I’ll write a continuation to this blog post with a tutorial on adding a feed to outlook.

An RSS follows the XML definition, XML is a markup language. Markup languages are used to encapsulate data. So the information encapsulated in RSS tags will commonly be a title, a decription, a date, and a link, but RSS feeds such as this blog’s include more information. Examples of RSS feeds that hold other types of information are Podcasts; they hold links to videos.

Finally, RSS feeds are denoted by this icon and its orange color:

The RSS official icon.

Its a tough sell and ironically its obviously never charged for, but clients rarely like scrolling to the bottom of their website and finding a purposely contrasting visual element, till’ we list the benefits:

• Its all there, kinda like a visually appealing sitemap
• Helps your SEO, its got low visibility… ok but the links, headers, and bolds are there
• No-nonsense navigation, just scroll down and be worry free
• Include your crosslinks: a blog, relevant sites of the industry, whatever you please

If you read all this and still dont know what I’m talking about here are some of the quick-link panes you may notice in your daily browsing routine:

Quick Link Pane in social news site Digg

International Heral Tribune - Quick Link Pane Web 2.0 trend

gamespot - this Quick Link Pane is more traditional pre-Web 2.0 This case is annoyingly SEO purposed but hey! use it how you please.