Bing To Become Default iPhone Search? 463
snydeq writes "BusinessWeek reports ongoing talks between Apple and Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine for the iPhone. The discussions reflect an accelerating rivalry between Apple and Google, one that some believe will be the most important rivalry in tech in the years to come. 'Apple and Google know the other is their primary enemy,' says one person familiar with Apple's thinking. 'Microsoft is now a pawn in that battle.'"
Re:Microsoft still way behind. (Score:3, Informative)
Bing has those.
>lets me manage documents, my email, and my searching all with a single interface
If you log into Bing, you also log into Windows Live, which gives you access to Email, Calendars, your 25GB SkyDrive, and (coming soon) online office apps. As far as being able to do those from the iPhone...I would expect to see that soon, if not already. There is a Bing app, but I don't know exactly what it does.
Re:Marketshare gains misleading... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Marketshare gains misleading... (Score:4, Informative)
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47300 [userscripts.org]
Re:Apple to force ads on the iPhone?! WHAT? (Score:3, Informative)
Blame Firefox (Score:2, Informative)
I *really* hate Google for destroying the right-click copy-link-location. Maybe I'll change to Bing, it does not do that.
Google didn't do that. Pretty much any browser except for Firefox copies the REAL link just fine.
Firefox instead tries to go the extra mile by looking at the href, noticing there's an onclck(), and following that to figure out what URL will be called when you, well, click. So it copies some URL you are never meant to see, much less copy. The fact is that Firefox is NOT copying the visible text, and I don't think it's fair to blame that on Google.
Re:Blame Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Have you used Firefox? It has two options: one is "Copy" which copies the visible text; the other is "Copy Link Location" which places the URL in the clipboard. In this case, Firefox is not copying the visible text because the user is not telling it to do that.
Re:It's not a search engine (Score:2, Informative)
Apple was not *SAVED* by Microsoft. Apple still had cash in the bank. The $150 million investment in non-voting stock and other agreements such as Office for 5 years where part of a very serious IP theft and patent suit Apple had against Microsoft related to Video for Windows. Steve turned it into an opportunity to get some positive press for Apple by spinning the settlement into a "vote of confidence" from Microsoft and Bill Gates.
Google is pissing me off with the wild encroaching into all sectors (not unlike MS) but I do not want BING. It sucks.
Re:Blame Firefox (Score:1, Informative)
I have noscript on. I'm always getting the real URL. I guess that some people hate noscript, but it works just fine for me.
Re:Microsoft still way behind. (Score:2, Informative)
You mean, hotmail (or windows live mail now, whatever it is called, it's the same one as 1995)? That crap slow as hell and that works poorly even on IE8?
Re:Blame Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Have you used Firefox? It has two options: one is "Copy" which copies the visible text; the other is "Copy Link Location" which places the URL in the clipboard. In this case, Firefox is not copying the visible text because the user is not telling it to do that.
You still misunderstand. For Google result pages, the href attribute of the links is actually the original URL (which can be trivially checked by looking at the source HTML). However, the page also has some JavaScript which intercepts clicked links, and redirects you via Google so that they detect the click. The problem with Firefox is that its "Copy Link Location" command does not copy the value in a/@href (as all other browsers do it), but tries to be smart, looks for said associated script, and sees where it will forward you to.
Re:Blame Firefox (Score:1, Informative)
The standard was <a ping...>. Unfortunately, "privacy" folks went nuts about it and didn't want any browser to support it. Firefox implemented it but turns it off by default.
At the time, some folks such as me pointed out that a site could always do whatever it wanted with the html, so limiting this kind of an interaction was a pointless battle. By not supporting ping we'd just make the sites use redirectors or javascript hackery to get the same information. Thanks to the anti-ping folks, we got the fun of open redirector vulnerabilities, now we have links that don't copy, and at no point did the analytics information that sites collect ever change. Thanks!
Re:Blame Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody's at fault. The standard defines how authors (including Google) are to write their pages and how User-Agents (including Firefox) are to render it. It doesn't define how the browser chrome's supposed to look (heh, d'you really think the fugly hack Firefox' interface is or that cluttered mess called Internet Explorer would've made it through?). What's defined, almost down to the pixel, is the rendered page, bordered on top by the tab, on the right by the scroll and on the bottom by the status bar.
Google uses two attributes of the A tag in conjunction: HREF and ONCLICK. Href tells the user-agent where to send the client if the link is interacted with, i.e. clicked on or highlighted and confirmed with a press of return. This is meant to be the destination site. Most user-agents reveal this information to their user when hovering over the link. This can be helpful when deciding whether to visit the page or not. Sending it through a forwarder is allowed but generally considered bad behaviour, because it removes the ability to "look ahead" from the user.
The onclick attribute is a call to an embedded script in the page. This could be used to do additional processing when clicking a link. For example, href could be used with target to open a link in a new window. Onclick could be used to open a window of a specified size and configuration for all clients who run scripts, while those who don't will get the default window. With smaller capabilities from the browser, the experience would degrade gracefully. Onclick can, as Google prominently demonstrates, also be used to track which search results their users click on for a given query. Their rationale is most likely getting feedback in order to improve their search results. Obviously, there is a slight loss of privacy.
Now on to "Copy Link Location". This feature is a part of the browser. HTML or related standards won't touch this, so Firefox doesn't violate any standards there. Applicable standards would be along the lines of the Gnome Human Interface Guideline or the equivalents for other platforms. None of those define the expected behaviour of "Copy Link Location" in relation to a hypertext document.
The only standard that applies is user expectation, which should be copying the href attribute. Fx tries to go above and beyond that and catch the actual location the user might be forwarded to by extended onclick attributes. For some combinations of href and onclick, this can yield better results. For some (including Google), it won't.
TL;DR: No standard applies. Firefox attempts to go above and beyond user expectations, fails to deliver and is somewhat at fault.
Re:Marketshare gains misleading... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Big Battle (Score:5, Informative)
What happened to judging products on their merits?
It is quite common to judge products based on the manufacturer's reputation.
Has Microsoft really damaged you so much that whatever they do meets so much resistance that the sheer *thought* of using a product would make you cringe?
Absolutely, and their EULAs are even worse today.
And on a related note, what should Microsoft do to regain your respect?
Honestly it would take quite a lot, but acknowledging that using software has no greater relationship to copying than using a book does would be a good start.
On a social analogy, is a thief always a thief, even when he shows remorse and changed his ways?
Once a whore always a whore is probably the better analogy, particularly considering who Microsoft is in bed with. They make it well known that they continue play for sure.
Re:Marketshare gains misleading... (Score:3, Informative)
> When you're clicking any Google link, theres subsequent javascript request being sent to Google on what link you clicked
Nope. That's not even possible. Once you've gone to another site, no javascript events on the original site can fire. It's not even physically possible. Don't make stuff up please. They could do it using the Google Toolbar, but not using javascript. The closes thing they do is to use a 302 http header redirect, but again, that's got nothing to do with javascript.
Re:Big Battle (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.bing-vs-google.com/ [bing-vs-google.com]
Re:Big Battle (Score:5, Informative)
Why is the parent modded troll? The results are easily reproducible:
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Why+is+Microsoft+Windows+so+expensive%3F%22&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n&sc=1-40 [bing.com]
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=%22Why+is+Microsoft+Windows+so+expensive%3F%22&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aql=&aqi=&oq=%22Why+is+Microsoft+Windows+so+expensive%3F%22&fp=e8d6ef47431c6a4a [google.com]
The specific first hit on Bing is the specific answers.yahoo.com question "Why are Mac's So Expensive".
Re:Big Battle (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Blame Firefox (Score:3, Informative)
I think it is fair to blame it on Google. Look at the status bar. Hovering over the link shows the actual link. But as soon as you press right-click, regardless of whether you actually copy anything, the link changes to a referrer. If I had to guess, I'd say it was done as part of the collaboration between Google and Firefox. Firefox is paid for by Google, and so this is simply another way for the browser to make itself valuable to its benefactor.
Re:Big Battle (Score:2, Informative)
I'm still not buying it. I think it's just a kind of naturally reified Googlebomb/Bingbomb. At this point, all you have to do is start typing "Why is" into EITHER search engine and that entire question will appear as an autocomplete, so clearly, you're not getting unadulterated results in either case.
Yet, if I enter "Why is Microsoft Windows so awesome?" as my question, the second result, ON BING, leads to a page explaining why Linux is better than Windows. Google actually gives more favorable results toward Windows.
So what you are saying is that, even though Bing may not be biasing results, in both the "Windows more expensive" and "Windows so awesome" searches Bing returns poor results with Google's being much more relevant?