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.

In the internet, we immediately thought of the following two that had sparked our curiosity before:

1. Google adwords
2. Facebook ads

The thought process for choosing these two for our online ads was that the wizards for creating them were super easy and yes… fun!

Well actually, Facebook’s was real fun; Google’s was systematic and organized but not as fun as i had to do a lot of work to find proper keywords.

Facebook Ads Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. You can choose the exact demographic you want to target in a super friendly user interface. It even tells you the maximum number of people in the targeted group.
2. Limit your daily budget whenever you please.
3. Stop campaigns at any time.
4. Ads are prominently placed in the site (My Opinion).
5. You bid for how much you are willing to pay on a daily basis.
6. Billing is timely.
   

Cons:

1. You are only really targeting people from Facebook.
2. The bidding system is creative but sometimes Facebook just wouldn’t place my ads, even if I bid 50 cents per click.
3. You can’t edit ads! This was very frustrating as I had to go through all the creation and ‘waiting for approval’ process just to change a typo.
4. The analytics area is ok, but I hoped for more. Graphs specifically are buggy as they approach the current date.

Google AdWords Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. Your ads will show in all corners of the internet. Their propagation is truly ubiquitous you see adSense ads throughout the internet and your Granny’s site.
2. Create a monthly budget. This is so-so but still a pro; I would rather be able to change daily budgets on the run.
3. Stop campaigns at any time.
4. You can edit ads. As dumb as this sounds it is really nice to have.
5. You can easily link this to your Google Analytics account. Analytics can’t get better than that, you’ll have conversion rates, link sources etc.

Cons:

1. Google ads are the poster boy for ignored dead space of the internet.
2. There is a world behind AdWords that often gets shady and smelly the reason is keywords, as you are associating your ad with search results and web page content some people try to outsmart Google with keyword schemes and it is really very confusing as I for one can’t interpret Google’s contradictory stand point on this. I should make another blog post about this subject.
3. When will they bill me? I remember reading it when I created  the ad, but where’s the bill? This was a big no no as I forgot about the ads. That meant running the ad for a couple of months more that the specific week I chose for making this blog post.

If I have to choose a winner it would be facebook and you can find my reasons in the following chart:

Results of ad campaigns.

Furthermore, as I chose a targeted demographic I’m certain those clicks were more relevant than Google’s, in fact conversion rates from facebook were higher too. However I had to measure all effectiveness with the  Google Analytics tool.

So these are the pros and cons I found, please tell me what you think and alternatives to online advertising.

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.