Twitter

If you’re like I am, your Twitter stream is probably public. For me, the value of Twitter is its ability to let me share news and comments that current and potential clients may find useful. I also use it as a way of interacting with clients if our regular communication channels are down.

So I certainly don’t say anything using @chcs (my company Twitter account) that can’t be public. I also have a personal Twitter feed, @HamiltonChas, that mostly focuses on my comments regarding local politics. I also tweet using @GrowTrains, an account that reflects my interest in improving passenger train service.

Most of the people I’ve talked to compartmentalize their Twitter activities this way. Many of my WWD colleagues have several accounts, each of which focuses on a different aspect of their professional and personal interests. Third-party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck, Brizzly, Nambu and Hootsuite, make it easy to manage more than one account.

Others, however, don’t like this approach. WWD writer Scott wants to see our personal lives — he states”Telling me in your bio that you don’t post personal tweets guarantees I’m not going to follow you back. Aren’t you interesting?” I certainly hope so, but I’m not sure that my clients want to hear me babbling on about the upcoming election in Seattle, or about how we need high-speed trains.

But now that my tweets will be included in search engines, having multiple Twitter accounts will make it possible to make one or more of them private, should I decide to do so. However you use Twitter, make sure that its privacy controls are set in a way that’s appropriate for your needs.

Facebook

I doubt that too many people will be upset by the addition of Twitter messages to Bing and Google, since Twitter’s own search and services such as OneRiot have been around for a while. Facebook searches may prove more controversial.

It’s likely that most people think of Facebook as a much more personal communication outlet than Twitter, since generally, people have Facebook’s privacy controls set to display content only to those they’ve “friended.” And as I wrote about this morning, one can even give different levels of access to certain people — my “personal friends” group can see more of my Facebook activities than my “business contacts” group can.

But I certainly hope that Facebook will give us a way of opting out of having our status messages show up in search engines. At this point, it’s unclear how Bing’s Facebook searches will work (they aren’t live yet). Google will reportedly take a personalized, opt-in approach, only showing status messages of your Facebook friends if both you and your friends tell Google which social networks you use.

It’s also not clear how Facebook Pages and Groups will be searched, although they are generally more public, and mostly used to encourage interaction with fans, or advocate for causes.

So in the coming weeks, web workers will want to evaluate how we balance our privacy against the marketing boost which might come from having our comments appear in Bing and Google searches.

Will you let search engines index your status updates?

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What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects.

Clicking on any of the tending topics (Bing calls them the “Hottest Topics on Twitter”) generates a search for that term, which at the time of this writing isn’t returning any results. The site is still in beta, and this will no doubt be resolved, possibly by the time you’re reading this post, even. You also get to see some links below the Hottest Topics pertaining to individual trends, complete with some examples of tweets containing those links below it for context.

For now, it seems to be more of a promise of what’s to come than a fully functioning feature, but what it does provide, along with Bing’s usual helpful sidebar results, promise a much more thoughtfully organized, searchable and usable service for people using Twitter for research or to track trends. There’s even a “retweet” icon next to each Twitter result, which leads you directly to your Twitter page, so you can share your discoveries with your followers.

I’ve been skeptical of Bing in the past, but if this is what the future holds, it won’t take much to convince me that Microsoft has some great ideas about search.

What do you think of the new Bing Twitter search?

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To perform searches, you start with a category such as “Digital Cameras,” where a search will present you with a large tapestry of individual photos of camera; a portion of the digital camera-related results is shown below. Clicking on any camera in the tapestry will take you to dedicated search results for that camera. This seems, in particular, to be a good search metaphor for, say, shopping for tech products online, where the look of the product might matter a lot to you. For general use, though, there are some other visual search engines that I favor.

As Webware notes, the new visual search feature in Bing “showcases the real value of having a search engine that blends structured data into the results.” As long as you perform visual searches on topics that are mainstream, for which Bing will tend to have a lot of structured data pre-indexed, you’ll tend to get rich sets of results back. The digital camera shopping example I supplied above is a good example of that. You can identify the camera you might like by its design, then jump immediately to lots of specific data about it. For less mainstream topics, though, the visual metaphor won’t be so useful, which is probably why Microsoft only supplies a limited number of topic categories as it beta tests the new feature.

There are a few other visual search engines that I think I’ll probably continue to use more regularly than I’ll use Bing’s new feature. Two of my favorite ones, which I wrote about here, are Viewzi, and RedZ. The best way to get a sense of what these do is to try a search, but Viewzi essentially lets you toggle between many types of visual presentations for any search topic, and RedZ gives you a rotatable set of web page thumbnails, as seen below for a search on digital cameras. You can then cycle, or rotate, through the results just as you would cycle through album art on an iPod with the Cover Flow feature.

If you haven’t tried it, I also recommend giving SpaceTime3D a try. It’s a little like RedZ, in that it presents you with arrays of web page thumbnails that you can cycle through to see what may interest you, but it presents bigger and nicer representations of the pages, and has a very slick interface.

I don’t rely on visual searches all the time, but for tasks such as shopping for new technology products online, researching people and news stories, and anything else where a picture can be worth a thousand words, these tools are useful.

What do you think of Bing’s Visual Search feature?

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One thing that Bing does well is give you categories and suggestions related to your searches on the left-hand side of your search results screen. You can get a real feel for how the two search engines differ in this regard by going to Bing-vs.-Google and entering, say, the name of a software application in which you’re interested. As seen in the screenshot above, I typed in “GIMP” for a search there, (GIMP is a popular open-source graphics application) and Bing gave me a number of links on the left side of my screen that were more helpful than Google’s links, including a prominently placed link for downloading the app.

As I’ve noted before, Bing is also very good at natural language searches, for answering questions such as “Which companies has Google acquired?“ It’s good at these because technology from Powerset, leveraging the clustered query intelligence found in the Hadoop software framework, is built into Bing. Using Bing vs. Google, I was able to get several better answers to natural language questions from Bing than I was from Google.

One thing that I wish Bing vs. Google could do is allow me to search for images and video. I can’t see any way to do so, and it’s a shame, because both search engines are good at retrieving pictures and video, and both have their own advantages. For example, Bing lets you hover your mouse arrow over video thumbnails, and see the videos playing in thumbnails before you go to the trouble of visiting the pages on which they’re housed. I wish I could do that on the left of Bing vs. Google’s dual-paned view, while viewing Google’s results on the right.

Google remains my favorite search engine for its reliability and accuracy, but Bing shines at some tasks, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the Bing/Google mashup applications grow and become useful. For now, Bing vs. Google is mainly a novelty, but it does help drive home some of the unique advantages that the two search engines have.

Do you turn to Bing for certain tasks, or does Google remain your default browser?

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Lately, many people have been experimenting with Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine offering, which we covered here. I agree with the many people who are noting improvements that need to arrive in Bing, such as blog searching and more varied search results for basic keywords. However, not everyone realizes that Bing is built on a powerful search engine technology from an open source-focused company that Microsoft acquired last year: Powerset. As I covered in this post, the Powerset technology underlying Bing introduces some powerful features that many people aren’t trying. You may find them useful.

Powerset originally got noticed in the search community because it leveraged Hadoop, which is an open-source software framework that allows clusters of computers to make very quick work of mining large data sets. (Hadoop also powers Yahoo’s search engine.) Powerset’s idea was to leverage Hadoop to improve natural language searching, where you type in questions in sentence form instead of using keywords. If you’ve followed natural language searching,  you’ll know that it’s had a rocky, and generally unsuccessful, history.

Hadoop brought Powerset more speed at mining through the mountains of possibly relevant search returns that come back in natural language search engines. Powerset doesn’t underlie all of Bing, but this unique facility with natural language searching is in Bing, and you may find it useful if you haven’t tried it.

Here are some example queries to try at Bing.com, to get a sense for how it works:

• Which companies has Google acquired?
• Which Firefox extensions block online ads?
• What is the semantic web?
• How much was MySQL acquired for?

You’ll notice that many of the search results that come back in these types of searches at Bing are mined from Wikipedia, because Powerset has always specialized in Wikipedia search. Entries on Wikipedia aren’t always correct, so you have to take results with a grain of salt, but Microsoft has extended Bing’s facility with natural language search beyond just Wikipedia searches, and it can be quite good at providing quick answers to natural language questions.

What do you think of Bing’s natural language search capabilities?

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Basic Search

Before looking at some of its more advanced features, let’s compare it in terms of a straight-up, simple keyword search on a subject close to my heart. Finding information on Apple is a part of my job, and I run Apple-related searches on an hourly basis, if not even more frequently, over the course of the day.

Searching just for the keyword “Apple,” I found the results fairly telling. Bing returned mostly product pages and sub-sections of the official Apple site. While useful to some degree, these pages are not generally the kind of thing that I’m looking for.

Google returns far more context in the first page of results, including Wikipedia results, news results, the Apple store, Apple Developer Connection, and Slashdot pages relating to the subject. This wider view provides much more material for actually accumulating knowledge about any particular subject.

No Blog Search

Bing looks a lot like Google, and it has a lot of the same features, in the same places. Along the top, you have different search options. A news search is available, along with videos, images, and something called “xRank“, which displays the most popular search results.

Notably lacking, though, is a blog search like the one Google has. The news results page in general is far less powerful and detailed than Google’s, and less easy to navigate. There are blogger rankings in the xRank results, but these appear to be more of a popularity contest and less of a useful feature.

More Advanced Searches

Using keywords to try to deliver instantly useful results for things like travel and quick calculation is definitely something that comes in handy in a search engine. Looking up “travel boston” returned nearly identical results in both search engines, though I did appreciate Bing’s “related searches” in the left-hand column. You can turn on related searches in Google, but they’re more hit or miss than Bing, and they’re switched off by default.

Performing a local search showed another vast gap between the two engines, though. Entering “restaurants near” followed by my postal code returned a long list of actual restaurants and a map displaying their proximity in Google, while it just returned a regular list of results, and not particularly useful ones at that, when entered into Bing.

Bing does calculations just as well as Google, though neither search engine provides a really smart or intuitive way to do currency conversion as of yet, in my opinion.

Verdict

For now, Microsoft still seems to be playing catch-up. Maybe it should stop being so concerned with name/branding changes, and start trying to make leaps in usability instead. This web worker is definitely sticking with Google, at any rate.

Will you be adding Bing to your search toolbox?

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