Google Reduced To Copying Bing
Google has reduced itself to copying Bing. First, when word got out that Bing was going to have tweets appear on its search results, a few Gaylers (google employees) jumped in a car and drove to San Francisco with a $25 million check and begged Twitter to give them access to the feed firehose. Next they copied Bing’s search results page and now they are copying Bing’s homepage.
Bing displays spectacular images from around the world. It has become very popular, so much so that some grade schools begin their day by discussing about the picture on Bing’s homepage.
Unlike Bing, Google’s homepage allows you to upload your own image. They pass it off as personalization. The real reason is that the pictures Microsoft features on it homepage costs alot of money. Microsoft does it as part of its community give back. Whereas, Google is too cheap to pay for anything, unless they think they are getting your first born for nothing as in the case of the Twitter firehose.
Worse, the homepage upload feature has a bug. It will not let you delete the image. The image is stored as part of a library that others can reuse. So if there is a lawsuit the person that uploaded it is at fault not Google. YouTube operates under a similar model – the person that uploaded the video is responsible not Google. On the other hand it could be a bug – and if it is then that tells you that they are asleep at the wheel or just plain stupid to allow such an error on the homepage.
In the end Bing did not end up displaying Twitter feeds on its search results page because it was too spammy. Google did and turned its search results page into a spam engine.
