Bing 2, Google 1

That's the latest score of my Google vs. Bing contest. Everyone knows all about Google, I'm sure, but probably fewer people know what Bing is. Bing is Microsoft's newest edition of its LiveSearch search engine.

A couple of months ago, when Cuil came out, I decided to compare the search engine that I currently use, Google, with Cuil, to see which one I liked better. Well, it only took about five searches before I knew Cuil wasn't cool.

When I found out about Bing, I thought I'd try the same thing. I've been going back and forth between Google and Bing, trying them both out with various Internet searches as I've needed information. Particularly when I find out that one search engine didn't give good results. In that case, I've gone over to the other one to see if it did any better.

For the most part, if one gives crappy results, so does the other one. Perhaps it's because I'm just not searching for the right thing. There has only been one time where things were different. Bing gave me nothing of value, but Google pulled through. So after about 100 different searches, I finally found something worth giving a point out for, and Google was ahead 1-0.

So today, I needed to find a particular image, when suddenly I realized that Bing was deserving of a couple of points. The Bing image search had a couple of extremely nice features, which I gave a point for each on.

So here's the features that give Bing its points. First, when I did a search, it brought up about ten images, just like Google's image search. Nothing new yet, but when I went to scroll down, instead of discovering a button to press to get results 11-20, it just automatically loaded the next ten images! I was impressed. It saved me a couple of clicks, and I could still see the images from before too. Now, I suppose that this could get bad if I just kept scrolling down, and ended up with an enormous list, but if you haven't found what you're looking for in the first 100 images, you already know, then and there, that you're searching for the wrong thing. So that was a feature that I really liked.

The second thing that I really liked was once I clicked on an image, it opened up a nested window to the page that it was on. Google's image search does this too. It took me a couple of seconds to realize, though, that over on the left hand side were the images that had come up on the search page, and rather than having to press the "Back" button to get back to the other images, I could just do it there!

So, anyway, the score stands at Bing 2, Google 1....

On a related note, StatCounter shows that for a while, Bing was cutting into Google's huge lead in total web searches, but that things have mostly returned to normal. Check it out for yourself: http://gs.statcounter.com

Maybe you should all try out Bing and tell me what you think. (www.bing.com)

Pandora Radio

I've been using Pandora.com a lot lately, when I'm on campus and don't have any of my own music to listen to. I really like it. In fact, I like it a lot better than regular radio for a number of reasons.

1. I can make a channel that plays the music I want, rather than choosing from whatever channels already exist.
2. When a song I don't like is on, I can skip it (most of the time).
3. If none of the stations that I have is playing what I want, I can just create another channel that is almost identical to the other channels, so I can basically listen to whatever I want, as long as I have enough stations.
4. If I'm listening to a song I like, I don't have to worry about missing another good song on another station, because they all pause when they come to a new song.
5. No commercials.... At least no commercials I have to listen to. It does seem like their visual advertising has become even more aggressive over time. Maybe in a few months or years, you won't be able to find the player, because its buried in ads. :( But at least I don't have to listen to the ads. Or worse: the radio hosts.
6. They've got a lot of extra features that might be pretty useful, like being able to buy the song on iTunes, and bookmarking it and stuff.
7. If I really hate a song, I can have it not play it any more! How nice is that?! Now if only I could get it to completely ignore certain artists....

I really like it right now, though the total number of possible selections seems kind of small, so I'm sure I'll get sick of the available choices before too long. Hopefully they'll keep adding new songs. If you haven't ever tried it out, I'd recommend it. So thanks Dave, for introducing it to me!

Java Nimbus

OK, so I haven't posted anything in a long time.... That's because I know nobody is actually reading this! But I was just playing around with Java's new Look and Feel, Nimbus, and I'm quite impressed with it. The old L&F was absolutely horrible (it's main competing L&F was the Windows 95 L&F. So it is really out of date. But this new one looks quite nice!

It's been a while...

OK, it's been a while since I put a post here. I've been quite busy with finals, and now I've been working on my new website. Everything is transferred over now, mostly, and I've added a lot of things to make it look nicer. I heard they fixed the Pythagorean theorem. That's good. I don't know what we'd do without it!

My Wiki

Well, I've put most of the old stuff on my new wiki now. It's pretty much complete. So go take a look at it at http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com