Sunday, September 27, 2009

Rant - Lack of Eloquence

First and foremost, I will warn you that this post is not well written. Well, as always, I will do my best to spell everything correctly and toss in the appropriate punctuation, but don't expect fine reasoning or a well-spoken wag of the finger.
Bing. You've heard of it probably. Microsoft's new search engine. They're really trying to push this out to everyone. I'm not sure if it's working for them or not, but boy are they trying. The first time it bothered me was when I saw their TV ad. A real person speaks a search query. Then they mimic the "other search engine" by rattling off a ridiculous string of nouns or phrases which are seemingly linked through poor logic. I'm sorry, but my Google searches don't resemble my click-trail on Wikipedia. When I search for "candle dipping" I don't receive "Pierce Brosnan" as one of the results (I just made that up. Clever, huh? - Please, please, please someone prove the existence of that chain in Wikipedia; 25 clicks or less preferably).
The other thing is MSN's news page.
Sorry. No.
It's not news. I don't know why I get sucked into it. It's horrible writing. Sometimes it's a catchy picture or maybe a title that I think somehow relates to my life. But I find myself reading MSN articles. Not news. Junk. Mindless, time-wasting garbage. But I find myself on that page everytime I log out of Hotmail. Sometimes I wish Hotmail was still privately owned. It was. Learned it on Wikipedia.
So they get me to read these articles and regardless of what it is, they have links pointing me to Bing. One type of article might be a series of interesting stories or facts, only half told. The other half posed as a question with a link to Bing where the question is supposedly answered. WHY NOT JUST TELL ME? I know the authors of the articles must know the answer, but why waste my time? And why does this work for Microsoft? It just sounds lazy. Imagine it in a school setting: "...then Washington began crossing the Delaware. To find out if he reached the other side and what happened if he did, please see what happened next. Actually, I might have to check that out. I'm not too clear on all the details.
That's all I got tonight. Looking back, that actually wasn't such a bad rant. We should do it again sometime.

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