Microsoft wastes our time with Bing

So apparently during TechCrunch50 today Microsoft released the new beta of their visual search technology for bing into the wild today along side of Google’s fastflip offering. They dazzled the crowds with flashy whiz bang features comprising of moving pictures and animated transitions that represent search results and lists of interesting information. While watching the live feed come in from the twitterverse, plenty of people oo’d and awe’d. My reaction? Yawn. I make no secret that I am a big fan of Google and it’s products but that’s not the reason I would still use google over bing.

I may have missed it but I don’t believe the speaker for bing mentioned that you have to install silverlight in order to use their new visual search feature. For those of you who aren’t familiar with silverlight, consider it Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash. In short, it’s a browser plugin designed to augment the functionality of a website beyond what open standards like html, css, and javascript support by default. I’ll admit I was curious so I went to their new site to play with it but when it nagged me to install silverlight I was immediately put off and I left. I wouldn’t use a search engine written in flash so why the hell would I use one written in silverlight?

I also couldn’t help but wonder how much R&D money Microsoft wasted making bing flashy and cool looking. And they wonder why they are so far behind in the search market, could it be their priorities rarely include developing good search technology? I haven’t seen anything similar from Google yet but I’m pretty sure the novelty of bing will wear off as soon as people realize it’s just not that useful. Thanks Microsoft, but no thanks.