Category: IT | David Coveney

The astonishing power of modern computing

Being very old (or at least, that’s how I feel being in tech!) means that after coming up to nearly forty years in technology, I’ve seen some changes.

My first computer at home, that I owned, that I could truly call my own, was a Dragon 32. It was a small, 32KB computer using the rather lovely little 6809 processor. This CPU ran at 2MHz and the system as a whole allowed me to learn a heck of a lot about computer science as a geeky teenager who was busy ignoring sports.

Continue reading “The astonishing power of modern computing”

The productivity paradox

I came across this chart recently and it gave me pause for thought as someone whose life work is designed to improve productivity. It shows that from 2008, although we know technologies have been growing in power, productivity growth suddenly dropped away from the trendline following the global financial crisis. Why?

This is where I fall back on an old story as a developer trying to make things more efficient. I worked with my colleagues to bring a client company the equivalent of about ten hours a day of labour saving due to using a well structured database for better data integrity over their previous ‘loose’ system. As they expanded, each branch would save at least an hour of time, and they were no longer capacity bound at each branch where more customers would linearly increase administrative work in a difficult recruiting environment. This would provide a return on investment (ROI) of less than a year.

It worked exceptionally well and the person we’d worked with said their staff were even worried redundancies might be on the way! This was never going to be the case in a growing company, because there’s an infinite amount of work to do.

All was good.

Then for some reason, our contact’s role was diminished and they eventually left the company. And the knowledge of the improvement left as well. The board’s innate distrust of anyone and their perception of us as no more than a cost base resulted in a great difficulty for us to help them without dramatically increasing costs by gold-plating every spec and decision.

This left the client unable to gain for advantage by exploiting our skills. It was difficult for us to see, and we could do little for them other to look for cost savings when, in reality, they needed to implement cost savings by using us more. Instead they opted for a recruitment based strategy to feed their growth and we parted ways as they shifted the system to a maintenance partner.

In all my thirty years of development experience I’ve seen this again and again. Instead of sticking with a solid set of developers who have learned your business details, chop and change to save money. Treat developers as a cost base and you lose so much knowledge that you’ll fail to gain productivity nearly as quickly as you could treating it as a partnership.

I don’t feel this is unique. I see lots of projects following an arc of big development then a cost reduction period which ends up losing the momentum of ongoing improvement.

Solving the productivity paradox

A strategy I now suggest when selling is to spend 60% of what you thought of on your project in year 1, then 40% in year two, 30% in year three, and then 20% a year throughout the product lifecycle. Software isn’t like building a bridge where things stabilise then stay them same for thirty years, sadly.

Fundamentally, I think corporate culture around custom software became both cautious and speculative following the global financial crash of 2008 and only invested in technology if it felt like it would create some impressive unicorn of an offering. We saw lots of developers tied up with venture capital chasing big things like blockchain and AI whilst ignoring the importance of daily incremental improvement that adds up to a huge return over time.

The answer then, is that if you have access to capital, you should stop chasing unicorns and start thinking about continuous pragmatic development aimed at dealing with all the little productivity blocks in your firm. Look to Kaizen style methodologies to help with structuring your processes around this.

What do you think? Feel free to comment!

Off-Cloud Backup for Heroku apps – a possible answer

The Heroku platform is an absolutely fantastic way to have to not bother with devops within a small development company. We’ve been using it at interconnect for years now, and whilst it’s not entirely perfect, it takes away one set of headaches and does so at a reasonable cost.

All the services offer backups, and the VMs are built from scripts and are essentially read only. So if something catastrophic happened to one of our databases, we can roll back a day and be OK. Except… let me explain my fears around data.

Trust issues with providers

In our very earliest years we used a VPS provider that used Plesk. Everything was solid and stable until one day, we got a report that a site had been hacked. Then another. It turned out that a vulnerability had exposed our sites to being hacked. And they were. This resulted in a big old clean up operation and restoration from backups. Except the daily backups we’d been paying for turned out to be weekly. So the backups we had were three days old. Ever since then, I’ve preferred to have a way of pulling backups separately to a server under my own control, unless the provider is Kumina, because I know the people so well that I’m 100% certain they’re as paranoid as I am and they’ve never ever let me down. But in the era of hustle culture bros who move fast and break things, you need a safety net.

Creeping corruption

My next fear is corruption you don’t notice immediately. I can well imagine that if all the meta data for the posts on a site before a certain date got wiped out, most people wouldn’t notice for ages. Imagine you’ve got a site with 200,000 posts, and various elements of the first 100,00 were damaged – the long tail matters to these sites and suddenly it’s all gone. Well, thank heavens for backups!

Except, of course, most cloud providers don’t provider substantial generational backups. Instead, they keep a few days or a week or so. And that’s your lot. If you need to go back months you’d better hope a developer in the company left a dump on their laptop somewhere – except of course that very very few developers keep dumps of production systems on their laptops – it’s bad practice and only tends to happen in exceptional circumstances and should be deleted soon after use.

How we fix it today

In the end, I asked one of my Linux oriented colleagues, Gianluigi, to create a service that would connect to Heroku’s API and then download every database, and sync every S3 bucket. It worked, with some limitations. More recently, because he’d left but remains a good friend, he helped me with a crash course in Linux sysadmin basics and I was able to extend and improve some bits. The system is a service written in PHP that does all the work. I then asked another colleague internally, Jack, to extend things to cover the PostgreSQL databases we also now used and to create a dashboard so that I could monitor the backups easily without resorting to logging into the backups servers.

The dashboard also doesn’t run on the backups servers. I needed to keep the backups as safe as possible – they’d be a great honeypot for a hacker, so they’re onioned away, and the backups service isn’t reachable from outside. Instead, it messages the dashboard with information about the backups taken. The dashboard also provides details on application and framework versions, for security monitoring and making sure updates have been applied appropriately, and it also sends me a daily summary email showing me storage space available and what was backed up in the previous 24 hours.

Here are a few screenshots of the system, with some censoring, but I hope you catch how it works from what you see.

To commercialise, or not?

And now to one of the reasons why I’ve decided to write about this. In the past, I created the first version of Search Replace DB – a quick script and algorithm I knocked up to parse a database and search and replace items in it. A fast, dangerous tool that I released as free open source code. Other people took it and commercialised it into successful products. We didn’t. And with the code being integrated into wp-cli and most devs would use that in preference (myself included!), except in those tricky situations where command line access wasn’t possible – mostly on cheap hosts. I think we were right to release the code, but where we failed was in realising the commercial possibilities. And that’s left me a little torn.

So now I’m torn – it’s not easy to set up services in Linux, but once you do, these things just run and run. It’s also not going to be the easiest thing to work with, so I anticipate support costs being quite high. It’s proper server level work. And I certainly don’t feel inclined to build a SaaS that acts as a conduit for people’s backups. It’s just too risky to have a central pool of lots and lots of backups, and people find them lurking on S3 buckets all the time. So I want to put this out to the community. Is this something you’d find useful? Let us know in the comments below. If we did release it, the code would be open source, but access to the latest versions would be restricted.

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Interesting times in the world of software

About a decade ago, I was at a conference and talking to a fellow developer (I still call myself one, even though I don’t code so much these days) when he giddily told me about the funding he’d got for building a new piece of software he was hoping would make it big. It was a two year project and he’d got £100k funding. I asked if it was just him… and no, he had a colleague. So £100k, for two people, for two years? £100k didn’t sound a lot… £25k/yr each, basically. Or what you can earn in a much simpler tech support role. I decided not to say anything and leave the poor guy in peace, although this sort of work seemed a lot like gambling to me.

Today, things are different although there’s still a sniff of gamble about it overall. If you’re a developer it’s relatively easy to find a highly capitalised employer that’s positively dripping with money who will pay you £60k-£90k a year. Potentially quite a bit more. This reminds me of the late nineties dotcom boom. In 1997 I myself quit my safe but somewhat dull job at a multinational to become a freelancer, doubling my income almost immediately, and quadrupling it another year later. The new work was, in some ways, more interesting. It was also a lot more stressful, bad for my health, and definitely wasn’t the most exciting coding work. But it paid. I honestly don’t blame developers who decide to do what I did 25 years ago. It set me up. I think it was also a large part of why I had a heart attack in 2019… living out of hotels for a decade wasn’t healthy, and cheese became far too much a food staple for me as a vegetarian. However, the money was very good and it helped set me up. When you’re poor, it’s very hard to catch up and a good income was necessary for a while.

I bring this up because today I’m not ‘just a developer’ but actually run a web development company that specialises in websites and custom software for clients. And things are happening today that are reminiscent of the dotcom boom on the late nineties. 25 years have passed, but people don’t really change nearly as much as you may think.

The dotcom & Millennium Bug era

The late nineties were a period of post-recession growth and capital release. Banks had been deregulated, money was being created in the way it can be, and we were riding high on increasing productivity. Life felt good. And when money is created it can be invested.

There’s only one little problem in that. Sometimes, people get giddy and start splashing the money out too readily. The boom of the late nineties and early noughties, and the deregulation that encouraged it around the world, eventually led to the financial crisis of 2008. I’m a bit of a cautious soul, so even though I had plenty of income, I resisted borrowing too much to get a bigger house. In some ways I was foolish, because I could now be living mortgage free in the house I have now. But I figured that not having a big mortgage would afford me some other freedoms and I could use my money elsewhere. Mostly I just invested my money in solid companies. Friends, however, were telling me to invest in dotcoms. But I looked at the fundamentals. One example was a firm called Vocalis. They did, basically, telephone voice services software. Small team, and had some crazy valuation that was effectively equivalent of £20m per member of the staff. I rightly reckoned that was mad. My friend went ahead and pumped money in, and I mocked him. For a while I looked a fool. The value of the shares rose and rose.

Right now, there are loads of speculation bubbles. At the café at work I was trying to explain Bitcoin’s fundamental problems to our barista, when our receptionist came over excitedly wanting to know more. Both seemed interested in getting involved. That means the crash is likely imminent. They’re both lovely people, but in the economic chain, they’re nowhere near the top, which means that the speculation bubble is reaching it’s limits.

“If shoe shine boys are giving stock tips, then it’s time to get out of the market.” – Joe Kennedy, 1929 as the stock market was about to crash and lead to the Great Depression

So the dotcom boom and Millennium Bug led to a boom in demand for developers. New software was being created to replace supposedly outdated software that couldn’t be fixed (narrator: “It could”) and salaries were rocketing. I took advantage of that boom. I also knew it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t. My day rate as a PeopleSoft developer went from £200 a day in 1997 to £600 in 2002. It could have been higher. Cisco did an amazing job of raising funds in that era and I remember they kept offering me more and more to go to work for them in the Netherlands. But I didn’t really want to go to work there. I never really chased the money, so that’s about where I peaked. But I remember people with the right skills, experience and self confidence were on as much as £1k a day. That’s getting towards £2k a day at today’s prices. Some skills seen as super hard and rare could command double that. Most people didn’t, of course, make nearly that much, and some people preferred a job with reasonable hours and close to their families – a very valid and decent decision. But I was single with no ties.

There are a lot more developers around today – good incomes have brought many people into the trade. I meet people who called me a nerd in the eighties and now they’re working in IT. It’s a bit weird.

Today’s situation

Now it’s a bit weird. Rates still aren’t at the dotcom level, once adjusted for inflation, but they’re close. You can do very well in tech. But in my little firm we pay typically around £40k for a developer, plus various benefits, kit, resources etc, meaning you’d need to make around £70k as a freelancer to equal it. At least the way I calculate things and always did. I nearly swapped my £600 a day for £60k a year and kind of regret not doing that.

But why have the rates risen? Well, there are a few hot areas, and they can be summarised as AI, analytics, mass market apps, and blockchain. I’ll discuss each briefly:

AI

This is a hot one – the idea we can replace rooms full of people doing dull and not very high value work (from the perspective of the company) such as service desks with AI bots is very attractive. It won’t work though. Most “supposedly AI” bots are just following decision trees and the only bit of AI is in parsing the meaning out of a sentence in a very tightly defined context. AI is useful today for categorisation problems – e.g. looking at a picture and deciding “this is a cat” or “this is a threatening comment”. It’s not brilliant at the job, but I like that an AI can work out which pictures are of my Mum, for example, even if it misses about a third of them… it still makes my life easier. A bit. But what an AI can’t do is right a decent blog post. Sorry, it can’t. They’re awful at it. There’s loads of AI generated content out there and it feels obviously fake. The main job of these AI generated blog posts is to trick other AIs (Google, Bing etc) into categorising a website as useful. And because AI’s make toddlers look worldly wise, they can be easily fooled… and that means you can’t trust them with anything of real importance. Like your business decisions.

But, it’s a hot keyword, and naive venture capitalists like the idea. So in comes the money.

Analytics

Tracking and stalking customers across the internet is very attractive for advertisers believing that doing so makes them seem more interesting to consumers. I’m not convinced. People often find it creepy. They feel like they’re constantly stalked. They visit the website of, say, a printer supplier and they receive ads for a month for printers… but not only for that supplier, but for other printers because the tracking provider is cheerfully using your data as a supplier against you and selling that information to your rivals! I think advertisers are starting to cotton on, but are unsure of what to do… but I know there’s a lot more direct selling of adverts between publishers and advertisers than there used to be.

But, the siren call of analytics is strong, and people love a nice chart on which to justify a decision, so the more nice charts your system can create, the more people will pay to use it and try to gain an advantage over competitors. And advertising is huge, so in pumps the money. For now.

Mass market apps

Can you build the next Facebook, Instagram, or Slack? What’s the potential for an app that lets people read books from any publisher for a fixed monthly fee? How about an app that revolutionises food delivery? Interestingly, some apps are about replacing old and inefficient intermediaries and putting new ones in place. Uber is a nice way of hiring a minicab with flexible pricing that rewards drivers for being available at the right time. They don’t disintermediate, however. The customer is both the driver and the passenger. The new intermediary takes their share.

If you can replace old intermediaries you can make a lot of money. Imagine taking 0.5% of every single financial transaction, like Visa do? That’s a lot of money. Then you have intermediaries between the card firms, providers, and networks, such as Stripe… and then there are those replacing old ones, like Wise, for money transfers across borders.

What other things can be improved? Well, literally anything.

But most attempts to build these apps and the supporting infrastructure are doomed to never turn a profit.

Blockchain

Blockchain is a really interesting concept for a public ledger, using an interesting concept called proof of work to make it hard for any one person to try to dominate the network and win the consensus mechanism on new transactions. There are theoretical ideas out there to improve on this, but at the moment they remain just that and haven’t been proven.

And it’s a scam. Pure and simple. But it’s a hot topic. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and many others are actively speculated upon, as well as being used for the exchange of value – often in a hope to evade regulators. It appeals to the natural rebels amongst us because it’s outside of government control… and given that governments aren’t always a force for good, I get that.

Problem is, Blockchain breaks the rules of good software development… if you look at the big O notation for software, it has to follow certain rules or it will fail at some point and need to be re-engineered. Big O matters. I don’t have academic access to papers, and the internet is full of vested interests pretending that Blockchain scales just fine. I used to see the same in WordPress land, where people said the software scaled fine… but it doesn’t. In WordPress we get scale by putting a layer between WordPress and the internet to balance things out – the work the software itself does goes up in line with the number of people talking to WordPress. We can define that as O(n) so long as you know what you’re doing – that’s OK. We can live with that. But the consensus mechanism required for multi node agreement of transactions as required to track transactions will, by its nature, follow a curve that is likely to be somewhat greater than O(n^2) (each node does O(n) work in a linear fashion but the total work done on the network as each node is added therefore grows as O(n^2) plus a bit for network latency and overheads. Yet bitcoin transaction cost isn’t following that curve in spite of huge interest because, I reckon, most Bitcoin trades aren’t real.

Yes, that’s right. And what does that mean? It’s because wideboys, crooks and the overly-optimistic are involved. Given it is, by design, a pyramid scheme, it will have to fail at some point. But people are motivated to hide that, so there are Bitcoin tracker schemes, rather like gold purchase schemes, that never hold the asset in question. They will pump and pump values as hard as you like. And as long as there are new people coming in, like our receptionists wishes to, all is good.

And there are enormous amounts of money to be made. As in a goldrush, the people making real money are the shovel makers and traders. And they need developers. So for as long as there’s money to be made, coked up wide boys will be gurning their way through stressful meetings, fidgeting and anxious to cash in before it crashes out. You can earn a lot there. For a while.

OK, so thanks for the very long essay. What does it mean then?

Well, it means developers are really expensive right now. Small firms that do actual useful work and aren’t highly capitalised (like mine) can’t grow because we can’t suddenly charge our customers double for the work so that we can compete against these booms. It’s as if a very rich person has moved into your town and hired all the builders possible to create a huge mansion. They even approached builders working for firms and offered them double to come build that mansion. Soon builders are all swanning around town in Teslas and feeling pleased with themselves for being so cunning as to be in the building industry.

Same in software. Locally there’s a Tesla with a crypto referencing private number plate and a young, bearded and muscular techbro driving it. Fine, I’m not going to judge. He’s happy and making good money.

But if builders are all hired by the rich, the rest of us get priced out. Same in software. Small firms are going to find they can’t afford websites unless they just use some cheap web builder platform – it’ll give a less good solution, but it’ll do the job. Ish. And the firms that can afford will do that bit better. And better. And the gap will grow.

At my firm I’ve had to raise salaries, but we still struggle to clear a profit with the raised salaries. I’m fiscally conservative, so we’ve always had decent cash reserves. This lets us ride out the storm. From 1997 to 2002 dev rates went crazy. By 2005 they were back to normal again. We as a firm can’t handle eight years of this. But it’s not quite the same as back then – you can now hire developers globally and have them work remotely, if you really wish to, which can save some money and also help those countries out with extra foreign revenue. I, however, really like quality and good communications and I find that a geographically tight team works the best. It also makes it easier to hire new people into the trade. So, for now, I’m sitting tight. I won’t seek venture capital, or borrow. And if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll add AI to something that does basic statistical analysis, and blockchain to something with two computers in the network and hope someone out there fancies throwing us some money so we join the party. In the meantime, however, there’s still a healthy living to be made as a business doing useful things and avoiding the hot trends. I never set out to be rich, merely secure – I’ll ignore the rich mansions and do my own thing, creating good code for good people.

n.b. about the above – the above isn’t a paper. It’s a set of opinions designed to inform and illuminate about what’s happened. It relies on anecdotes. Don’t take it too seriously and don’t use it as the basis for what you want to do with software and investing in software. Or crypto. Do your own thing with the information you gather from multiple sources. Also remember that a lot of people say misleading things because it’s in their interests to do so, and that you shouldn’t trust a random blog or news source on the internet. Mine included.

Blog “Reboot”

Hello – here’s the refreshed blog. I’ve decided to revert to a more typical blog format, after many months of soul searching on the issue. I previously had a layout based on a framework we used at interconnect/it for a couple of clients

But not only have I opted to switch to a blog layout, I’ve decided to use an off-the-shelf theme. I’m now using Khoi Vinh‘s Basic Maths WordPress theme.

Why?

Well, it’s a lovely theme, for starters. The typography is pretty good. The archives page is brilliant (check it out) and should be the standard bearer for all themes archive pages.

But the real question for many, I suspect, is why I’m not using an interconnect/it designed theme. Well, for starters, interconnect/it hasn’t produced an off-the-shelf theme in years. It’s just not our business. So rather than use a product of ours, we’d have to spend good and valuable time on creating a new theme. And, well, why would we want to do that?

Lots of reasons, actually. I could have a theme coded at the office that really shows off what we can do. But the problem with that is that there’s not much need. My blog is not an important one. It isn’t about WordPress (most WP related content will be on our company site, not my personal one) and it just doesn’t get much traffic.

I run a business. Its purpose is to make money, employ five people, and, with a bit of luck, turn a reasonable profit. Its job is not to service my ego or make me look good. A really good theme costs the equivalent of around £10k-£20k of chargeable time to design, code, test and implement.

Given that we’re turning work away, I thought “why bother?” And decided to go shopping for something.

So What’s It Like?

It’s actually quite weird using somebody else’s theme. I actually tried a few out and here are the things I learned that will hold us in good stead.

Themes don’t do enough to make life easy.

No really, they don’t. One of interconnect/it’s biggest challenges is making sure that WP is as easy to use for clients as possible. This means following standards, but it also means using some little tricks that help out – for example, registering and setting plenty of different image sizes, and setting/over-ruling whatever the media settings say.

Migrating WP content really sucks.

There’s a fundamental flaw with the default WP export/import. If you have inline images, although the importer has the ability to download and attach the image in your new site it won’t change the links. And if you do a search and replace, and your image sizes have changes, your lost. Totally – the img tag will point to a file that doesn’t exist.

So what do you do? Well, usually if I’m moving a site from one server to another, even switching domains, it’s a non-issue. I have my tools. But if you’re starting from fresh and working like an end-user would then you have to go through every single damn post in order to fix the images. Every post with an image in it. That’ll take a while.

If you’re really geeky, you’ll sort it, but it takes time. Way too much time. This kind of stuff needs to be sorted and it’s something we may look into as a contribution to the WP project.

Some Plugins Leave Lots of Crud

The reason for a reboot was that I felt that my site’s DB had been filled up with all sorts of crud. Lots of plugins create tables, leave options, and so on. Surplus tables have little impact, but they clutter the place up. But options, lots and lots of them, do have a minor performance hit, and they add up.

Other plugins leave hooks, don’t deactivate properly and so on. And over the years, I’d been through an awful lot of plugins. The site hadn’t been redone since WP 2.0 had been set up on it. I felt it was getting sluggish.

So… there are beautiful and amazing themes out there, and WP is wonderful, but there are little things that could make life just that bit better. Better migration tools, a better system of managing images within content and their migration, and a better system for activating themes so that image sizes are better handled.

Is it a lot to ask? Well, we’ll see what we can do about that!

Is WordPress Slowing My Site Down?

I noticed on my pingdom stats recently that this site has been slowing down recently. But why? Is it WordPress? Some plugins? Time for research!

I don’t really look at server response times too much, because generally it’s a bit dull, really. If our server is really sick then the automatic alerts and text messages from Pingdom tell me to get fixing.

Anyway, tonight I just thought I’d have a look at some graphs. And hey, there’s a bit of a shock… my own site, this one here, is getting slower. Here’s the graph:

Now, what you’ll notice is that generally everything looked nice and brisk until early August 2009 when there was a marked deterioration in performance. Then it plodded along just fine until December 2009 when it got worse again.

Is It WordPress Bloat?

I wondered what had happened to cause this – I’m especially shocked that a page load is now so slow. I haven’t changed the theme in use for at least a year, and the plugins are generally ones I use elsewhere. So I did a bit of thinking, and then it dawned on me when I found this list of release dates at WordPress.org:

The dates correlate exactly with the worsening performance of this site.

Now, correlation absolutely does not relate to causality. At upgrade time I usually take a moment to review plugins, upgrade the theme, etc. It could be that an upgrade or change to one of the many plugins in use here that has caused the slowdown. I know it’s not traffic to my site – that’s been flat for ages, with only the occasional blip. The server is a dedicated machine running about fourty sites that we manage, but the load is generally quite consistent and impact on different websites is fairly well managed.

But I’m a speed freak. I like it when a website zings into view. I love fast cars. I love computers that don’t dither. I love telephones that respond instantly. So I hate that response times are now below 1s. That’s not on!

So I’m going to try to find the cause of this slowdown – I’ll be running some experiments on this site, profiling queries, checking the database over and so on. And I’ll document it all as a way of showing you how we at Interconnect IT do our performance tuning. Whether I document it here or there I haven’t decided yet – I think it would make a good case study for the site. We’ll see! Watch both sites…

note 1 – deactivated Twitme on 03/02/2010

Five Things Bing Does Better than Google

MS have, at last, come up with what appears to be a competent rival to Google. Here’s five ways in which it beats Google.

Microsoft (MS), quite frankly, gets a lot of grief in the internet world. Sometimes it’s fair (I never like MSN, for example, from way back in the mid nineties) and often a little unfair.

But Live Search simply wasn’t up to the job. It didn’t work well. And I know that people that found IE defaulting to it would either work out how to change it, or simply type Google.com into the address bar. In other words, many tried it, but it didn’t find the answers they wanted. The algorithm has been slowly improved with time, but the damage was done. MS knew they had to relaunch.

Bing, they felt, was the answer. And in some ways, it’s a better and more productive tool than Google:

1. It’s Prettier

While I’ve heard many question the function of the landing page photo, I personally really like it. It’s attractive, well designed, and brings a little bit of beauty into the day. You can’t sit and surf pretty images at work, so if they’re there as part of the ‘wallpaper’ of a daily tool then that’s a lift we all need.

2. Infinite Image Search

The infinite scroll facility of the image search makes it a quicker tool to use. Chunking of text related searches makes sense, because we can scan a page relatively slowly, but with images the human eye can scan a huge amount of visual information incredibly quickly which means that Bing’s constantly scrolling visual tool is way ahead of Google’s image search.

3. Video Previewing on Video Search

bingvideo — Bing Video - content owner's nightmare or benefit?

Searching for video content can often be a slow and painful process. In Bing, when you get a series of videos up on screen you can simply hover your mouse pointer over a video to preview the first 30s and get a feel for the video, rather than visiting the site and waiting for a slow load. The previews are poor quality, in order to get quick loading, but they’re good enough. I feel this is one of Bing’s most effective innovations.

One thing where they may struggle is that if you click the video and that video has an embed option, you get it on the Bing site, rather than going through to the source site. So a YouTube video search result doesn’t send you off to YouTube. Content owners may not like this.

4. Site Preview

When you hover over a search result, you’ll see a small orange marker appear over to the right. Hover over that and up pops a preview of the content you’re looking for. Again, saves a wasted visit as it lets you scan a little bit of content for relevance – something that’s quicker this way than clicking on yet another unnecessary site.

5. It’s Not Google

Bing is, purportedly, a recursive acronym that means Bing Is Not Google. But there’s something important in that – Microsoft is a highly profitable, focussed company that has the resources to provide an alternative to Google. This is important – without solid competition Google will cease to innovate appropriately. MS suffered a similar fate on the desktop – they were too dominant and rivals couldn’t compete. Apple’s OS9 was dreadfully dated when sat next to a Windows machine of the same era, yet Windows had significant flaws. It’s only lately with Windows 7 that MS have really started to get their act together properly – because OSX finally gave it some decent competition in certain sectors.

When you start seeing articles on how to change from Google to Bing on Firefox, you know something’s happened.

It Can Get Better

Microsoft Seadragon, with it’s deep zoom and mobile capabilities, and Photosynth technologies could be tied into the image search, for example. As cheap processing power expands and more and more images are geotagged, this could form an astonishing visual search capability. A shame it won’t be coupled with Google Street View – imagine what that could be like?

Search is going to become more relevant and more powerful with time. Developers (our own Interconnect IT included) are busy creating a lot of powerful geocoded databases which will allow for some amazing mashups. If Google and MS start fighting for dominance in this space the opportunities for users and information suppliers are vast. Are you looking into it?