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January 04 2012
Microsoft Patents a Way to Tell You Where Not To Go
Anyone who’s journeyed on foot through a strange city can confirm that there’s a lot maps don’t show. For instance, whether it would be a really bad idea to wander through certain neighborhoods with an expensive camera around your neck. Or whether there’s a low-lying neighborhood that will be about 3 degrees cooler than it is everywhere else. Those kinds of things.
Though you won’t find that variety of information on Google Maps’ walking directions, you might soon see it on Bing Maps. Microsoft has just received a patent on a method for incorporating information like violent crime statistics into walking directions, so users could choose a specific rate of crime that they are personally comfortable with when planning a route (bike gangs, OK, murders, no). Other layers of information, like temperature measurements or falling-apart sidewalks, could also make appearances.
A tool like that will have plenty of users, though you know people are going to be disgruntled when their favorite neighborhoods get slapped with a D for dangerous (prepare yourself for an Internet freakout, Microsoft). What we’re really looking forward to, though, is a layer that routes you past all the grocery stores with free ...
February 02 2011
Google’s ‘Bing Sting’ Suggests Microsoft’s Search Engine Plays Dirty
Following a spy-novelesque stunt dubbed the Bing Sting, Google has denounced Microsoft for stealing its search results–and Bing’s reaction is nothing short of ambiguous.
Google reportedly got suspicious after it found that Bing’s search results replicated misspelled words from its own results, so the company decided to run a test by linking fake search results to nonsense search terms–and Bing took the bate.
Quoting Google software engineer Amit Singhal, the BBC reports:
“A search for ‘hiybbprqug’ on Bing returned a page about seating at a theatre in Los Angeles. As far as we know the only connection between the query and result is Google’s result page,” he said…. “We noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency,” he went on.
Bing’s reaction to the Google accusation is quite ambiguous: it refutes Google’s words at times, but seems to make excuses for itself at others. From the BBC:
Harry Shum, vice president of Bing, said: “We do not copy Google’s search results. We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search ...
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