Bing: Powered by Google - Stolen Search Results

Breaking tech news today! It has been uncovered that Bing has been poaching Google search results! Here are the cliff notes:

• Bing will show the spellchecked search results from Google, without fixing the misspelling.
• Bing results have been suspiciously close to Google results for a long time, Google decided to create a sting operation.
• Google created non-sense words and results pages for those made-up jumbles of characters.
• Google tasked engineers to search for these words from home, using Internet Explorer with Suggested Sites enabled and the Bing toolbar installed.
• Soon after, these non-sense search results (Which had NOTHING to do with the term searched for) started popping up on Bing.
• 7 out of 9 tests give overwhelming evidence that Bing has been stealing search results from Google.

So what exactly does this mean for Bing? Microsoft is holding a search event later today (which is why Google could be unveiling this now), and Matt Cutts is on a panel with them later today, so I expect we will hear more then.

The original tweet is here: http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/32459370511994880

Check out the very thorough and awesome analysis of the situation by Search Engine Land.

I think search is going to get very interesting over the next couple of weeks...

Fizy! Music for the Rest of Us

Yet another "Web 2.0" app to write about... This time, its Fizy! Have you ever just wanted to hear one song to get it out of your head, or look up an old classic, or just play one awesome song over and over again? Well now you can... for now that is..

Fizy is a super-simple, easy-to-use search engine / music player that probably has a couple weeks to live. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, I love the style, I love the simplicity, I love the way the songs just come up and play. Its fast, easy, and makes P2P just about useless if you only have an itching to hear a song once or twice. The advertising possibilities are endless! But then again... that's what people said about Pandora. Now I love Pandora as much as the next music junkie, but its become a lot less useful ever since the RIAA had their way with it.

I really love the direction Fizy is going, but I can't help but wonder... how long can they keep this up?

http://fizy.com/

Pipl - The People Search Engine

    By now you all know that courts make their records public for those over the magical age of 18. If you've ever received a speeding ticket, you're in a publicly accessible internet database with the charge plastered all over some webpage. But how much information is truly out there about you? And more importantly, how easily accessible is it? If you've ever googled your name, you've either been totally creeped out, or more likely, reassured. Google does a lot of things very well, the one thing they suck at is people search. I can search all day on Google for Tom Webster, and I think I'm the 18th on the list. Not bad... but most everything else in the search results are not me. Granted.. those with a more common name will be harder to search out, but Google doesn't index court records, and if they do, they don't do it very well. Pipl (pronounced "people") is more than just a public records search engine, its (as the name implies) a search engine if you're looking for one thing and one thing only: A person. Pipl searches not only court records, but they also search public government databases, tons of social networking websites, photo websites (such as flickr), LexisNexis, Amazon.com public wish lists, and many other places to grab information about a particular person. Its an absolutely amazing tool if you're an employer, and a terrifying tool if you're a person who's running from what's available in the public record. Pipl is a wonderful technical achievement for making information more easily accessable, but its also a bit unnerving. I have a FriendFeed Profile which I laughably nickname "Stalker 2.0", but its never quite revealed this much information. Again.. the less common the search term, the better results you'll get. Try it out! I'm sure you'll be digging up terrible family secrets in no time!

http://www.pipl.com