Deliberate Ambiguity

Bing: An Insider's Perspective

Today, Steve Ballmer announced at AllThingsD that Live Search will relaunching next week as Bing.  Given the amount of speculation on Twitter and that I'll be out next week on vacation when Bing actually launches, I thought I'd type out a few quick thoughts now.  Keep in mind that this is my own perspective and doesn't represent the view of my employer.  In case you don't know, I came to Microsoft Live Search through the acquisition of Powerset last year and work here as a program manager focused on Powerset integration and development.   

First a few comments on functionality and what I like in Bing.

I use Bing (formerly known internally as "Kumo") every day for all of my searches.  When I first joined Live, I used Live.com because I wanted to gain an intimate knowledge of my new product.  I freely admit that I frequently returned to Yahoo or Google when I couldn't find what I wanted.  Over the past six months, Bing relevance has improved noticably and dramatically. Now, I rarely use any other search engine.  When I have trouble finding something on Bing, my searches on competitors are usually just as sparse.

When I do use a competitor, I tend to miss some of the features on Bing (which, unfortunately, you can only experience through screenshots on other blogs until next week).  We've done a killer job designing the left-hand nav (affectionately known as the "ToC" for Table of Contents).  I love the organization of results (I wish it showed up on more queries!).  I also find the Related Searches to be super-useful and, being a frequent searcher (and re-searcher), Search History is literally my bread crumb trail. Another amazing feature is the Best Match, which tries to determine when I'm entering a navigational query (Walmart, Facebook, etc.) and gives me deep links, a search, sometimes a phone number, etc.  There's lots' more in there and I'm sure you'll get to see next week.  I'm excited to see people's feedback on the features that they find the most interesting.

Also, remember that there's a lot of complicated technology under the hood.  It's not just about the interface, it's also about delivering great results.

Which leads me into a few comments for those writing blog posts about Bing and who want to dive into the technology.

Please, please consider writing two blog posts: your initial impressions and your thoughts after you've used Bing as your primary search engine for a minimum of a week.  As per my admonishment in How *not* to rate a search engine, you can't test out a search engine with just a few queries, you have to use it for some period of time to form an informed opinion.  Give us a chance.

Building a search engine is super hard.  We did it from the ground up at Kosmix and the scientists and engineers here at Bing have been working on it for several years.  Awhile back, a friend told me that Amazon estimated it would cost $50-$70M to build a search engine; I think that number is way too low, both in terms of Capex and human capital.  My point here is that it's hard (impossible?) for a startup to challenge Google (cf. Cuil) and even companies with deep pockets are scared of such a huge investment.  Microsoft is committed to Bing and has an incredible architecture for advancing search.

Which brings me to an important point: give the underdog a chance.  I think folks here at Microsoft know that we're coming late to the game, that we're coming from behind, and that we've got some solid competitoin out there.  But competition breeds innovation and innovation is good for consumers.  As Steve Ballmer said today: search could benefit from a good ol' fashioned feature war!

Oh, and for you Powerset fans, there's certainly some Powerset in Bing, but there's a lot more Bing in Bing.  We at Powerset proud to be a part of the Bing team, but most of the credit goes to the incredible team assembled in Redmond.  Watch Powerset's blog next week for more information about some of Powerset's specific contributions.

I'm working for search engine number 4 exactly because I think that search is in its infancy and there's a long way to go.  Try out Bing, send us your feedback and we'll listen.  To me, the launch of Bing as a new Decision Engine today is a huge leap forward, but I'm even more excited about the next 6 months, 12 months, and 2 years.  Hope you hop on board for the journey!

Happy Birthday Powerset.com!

It's hard for me to believe it, but a year ago today, we launched Powerset.com.  Of all the products I've launching in my career, I'm most proud to be a part of the Powerset team. Happy Birthday, Powerset.com!

So, how did it go? 

The launch itself was a resounding success.  Powerlabs and the amazing community (thanks, Powerlabbers!) helped to hone the final product into something highly usable, despite the underlying complex technology. 

Though we mistakenly flipped the switch and went live a few hours earlier than we had planned, the huge engineering effort to ensure launch capacity was worth it: Powerset went down only once for <30 minutes when we got slashdotted.

Press coverage was awesome.  The 30+ press briefings we did prior to the launch helped to calm some of the hype around Powerset ("No, we're not a Google-killer, yes, we have some cool technology, yes, this is a long journey," etc.).  Some of the hype is unavoidable, but I think people realized that we had the seeds of something really cool.

When we started getting real-world queries, we found that users are ready, willing, and able to type in natural language queries.  However, we also discovered that it's really hard to market a Wikipedia search engine to people (lots of people wanted to search for Pizza near their house).  As we predicted, once people had a taste of natural language search, they wanted much, much more.

Then, on July 1, 2008, it was announced that Microsoft had decided to purchase Powerset.

This was an amazing start, but the journey has just begun.  I wrote a post a year ago musing about whether Powerset crossed The Uncanny Valley.  I think it's safe to say that neither Powerset nor anyone after us has been able to create a semantic search experience that meets users' expectations. However, now that we're part of Microsoft, I'm really excited that Powerset will help to transform the Live Search experience.  We've got a lot of things in the pipeline, so keep checking back for more announcements.

Wolfram Alpha: A Marketer's 2 Cents

Wolfram Alpha will be launching on May 18, 2009, almost exactly a year after Powerset launched.  Unlike other big flops launches, I am totally stoked about the Wolfram Alpha launch, especially after reading all of great posts written about pre-demos.  In the spirit of nostalgia for Powerset's launch, I thought I'd toss my hat in a ring (unfortunately never having had a live demo), focusing on Wolfram Alpha's pre-launch from a marketing perspective.

Branding. In launching a new search service, a comparison to Google is inevitable.  We explicitly told reporters that Kosmix and Powerset were not competing with Google, but they cannont resist the siren song of a controversial headline.  Wolfram Alpha is wisely branding themselves as a computation engine, suggesting questions that crunch numbers instead of better search.  Also, despite comparisons to Google, Wolfram Alpha is trying to be humble and remind people that the road to computation is a long journey, not a quick win.  Wolfram's post The Quest for Computable Knowledge: A Longer View sets the right tone in a historical context.

Audience. There have been a lot of complaints that the name "Wolfram Alpha" is too long and complicated.  In demos, they've been showing off chemical formulas, population graphs, and calculus. This will not appeal to my mom.  Instead of going after consumers, they are going after geeks who love data.  Most geeks associate Worlfram with Mathematica (and the ueber-geeks associate him with NKS).  I like the name, for now.

Competitors. Notwithstanding comparisons to Google, I'm surprised that few have compared Wolfram Alpha to True Knowledge, which is currently live and can answer inferential questions like who are queen elizabeth ii's grandchildren and who was the first woman to climb mount everest and what time is it in Boston.  Note that both of these questions require inference, but TK knows about QEII's kids and their kids (and that kid's kids are grandchildren).  Unlike Wolfram Alpha, TK has a system for users to enter and curate information in their database.  If TrueKnowledge can get enough editors, this is potentially a much more flexible system than manually curating government data.  Another obvious competitor is Metaweb's Freebase. It'll be interesting to see who else pops up in this space.

Benefits.  This is where Wolfram Alpha is going to have some problems.  It's just not very often that I have questions about chemical formulas and when I type in "Seattle, WA" the graph of the temperature might be interesting, but probably not what I'm looking for.  What is it that I should use a "computation engine" for?  At least in the short term, they're going to rely on geeks getting lost in all of the cool things that Wolfram Alpha makes possible. 

Scope.  As a corrolary to the above, Wolfram Alpha better do a phenomenal job on day one of explaining what data is availabe and what kind of computations can be done on that data.  If they're smart, they'll have tons of example queries that show off the power of the engine, lots of screencast and tutorials, and maybe even a contest to get users to generate cool queries.  Based on what I've seen, here are a few demos that I'm gonna try (of course I'm going to take my own advice and not rate Wolfram Alpha based on the results):

• Chemical formula of water
• Number of moles in a gallon of water
• What happens when you mix bleach and ammonia?
• What states are in the Pacific Daylight time zone?
• What's the time difference between Tokyo and New York City?
• What animals have a cloven hoof?
• Is it colder in San Francisco or Seattle in May?
• When did the wooly mammoth live?
• What were the top 10 largest cities in the US in 1990?

*waiting with bated breath*