I would like to start out this post by saying that I will never forgive Microsoft for their unwillingness to create web friendly, compliant browsers. IE6 was an embarrassment, but not fixing the same bugs in IE7 was shameful. So far I am ambivalent about IE8. The big issues seem to be worked out, but Microsoft has a way to go before they win back my support.
That all said, we’ve finally started getting a trickle of traffic from Microsoft’s new search engine called bing (yep, that’s a nofollow, even after my last post… I told you, no love from me). Starting on Thursday of last week, we’ve received three visitors a day from bing. Not a torrent, but better then nothing. I was starting to worry when we’d received no visits at all weeks after the service was rolled out.
At this point, I am reserving final judgment on bing. I know that my first instinct is to be suspicious. In the past, Microsoft has guarded its market share like a wild dog cornered with a scrap of rotten meat. Whether they break out of this pattern and play nicely with users and web infrastructure remains to be seen.
So far, I have to give credit to the simplicity of the front page and the SERPs.
In fact, the SERPs are eerily reminiscent of another large search engine.
What about the results themselves? I’ve read a lot of reviews panning the bing SERPs. There are complaints of clutter and irrelevant results. I don’t have a great deal of time for Microsoft product testing (it’s a principles thing), but I didn’t experience these issues in the least. I was only searching for niche technology topics, but my queries received quality results, and the relevancy was decent.
What do I think? Bing is not Google, even if they look the same. I think the results are somewhat less relevant, but I may be biased as Google is my only comparison. As a stand alone service, I begrudgingly give bing a tip of the hat. Microsoft seems to be on the right track. With some time to clean up its algorithm, this could be a competitive search service. We’ll see.
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10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?