I don't see a helluva lot of point. It seems like it's just a thumb in the eye of bing and everybody who has said "I like bing, it has pretty pictures". But it completely avoids the actual value of bing, which is to give you a new and interesting pretty picture every day. And in fact, just reading this article made me go look at bing's last few pictures.
If I want to look at one of my own pretty pictures, or some other picture I've chosen myself, I'll just make it my desktop background.
Interesting. This is actually what first came to my mind: Google is copying the desktop? Not Bing. As many of you said, Bing isn't the first web page to put a pretty background picture (some of the first web pages were the first web pages with pretty background pictures, were they not?). And, as we concluded, the concept is different - choosing, instead of getting a random pic.
So, now you can change the "desktop background" of your google homepage - "the Internet", as often called by many people where I come from. Add some shortcuts to the picture with pretty custom icons (links), support for a clock, a calendar (widgets), a tray or a bar with quick launch and various options...
If only a browser existed that loaded automatically when you start your computer, without the need for all that "windows loading stuff"... :)
If you're looking for an experience similar to the concept of a "cloud desktop," you should try out Favetop. It has icon shortcuts, which you described above, along with media management and social sharing capabilities. We currently do not have a customizable wallpaper option as of right now, but we are planning on offering this feature in the near future.
Thank for the suggestion. We're going to continue to try our best to ensure international users have as many of their favorite web apps and sites available to them as U.S. users. We currently have over 1,000 web apps and sites in our database for you to choose from and we are looking to offer users the option to upload their own site icons very soon. Btw, the BBC iPlayer app is now available with the added ability to directly search it from your Favetop if you'd like. If you have any other suggestions please let us know through the "Suggestions/Feedback" link on our homepage. :)
In order to develop my own opinion, I've been running a little experiment for the past week in which I switched the search box to Bing.
Basically, I have found very little difference in Google and Bing's search. They are both equally functional and fast. If anything, I've found that I have no reason to switch back to Google - Bing's daily rethemeing adds a little spark to my day.
I encourage everyone to try this for a week. You'll be amazed at how undifferentiated the two major search players truly are at search. These little user delighters are going to be a huge component in the battle for search revenue in the near future.
It's to be expected, with the public papers written on search and employees moving between them over time I'd imagine there algorithms would be quiet similar.
I disagree, every new server or desktop I setup has bing as the default search engine, before switching them to google, I'll sometimes try my search in bing and be horribly dissatisfied. I may have learned how to search on google (in a way to get better google results) but I can't figure out how to get Bing to give me what I'm looking for.
My mother regularly tells me how much she loves the Bing photos and how she's looking forward to "what will they put up next." She was asking yesterday how long it would be before Google did the same. Now we know...
Fortunately google is not quite as dumb as other companies in forcing every aspect of its business to pay the "strategy tax" of supporting every other product of the business regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
Oh snap, that's a good point. I turned off Buzz when it first came out because of all of the issues flying around and I promptly forgot about it. From time to time someone says something about Buzz and I think "oh yeah, forgot about that"
I love the idea. I'm not sure if the implementation would be better than the current white page (I'm very easily distracted, and I sometimes spend a couple of minutes on Bing just flipping through the background photos - they're a sampling of current world affairs, if you don't know) and so I think this is a visual improvement.
That said - I may well waste more time changing my background image the way I do my wallpaper.
Given the fact that the company relies so heavily on data when making UI decisions, I have a feeling that Google must have some pretty convincing data that would lead them to copy bing both in search results, and now with these iGoogle options...
Or, they're trying to encourage you to be logged in when you search. IIUC, you won't see "your" personalized picture unless you're logged in and cookied.
I read a little while ago that Bing's numbers are holding steady (not sure if they are growing now) while other search sites are shrinking (other than Google obviously) -- guessing this has something to do with it
Bing is hardly the first search engine to use a photo as a background image. Ask and Wikia Search are two examples off the top of my head that have offered that feature as well (most likely before Bing was launched, too.)
But it won't have the mouse overs that gives you little factlets? Does anyone know where Bing gets the images and facts for the mouse overs? Is it someone's job to put those together?
It definitely looks like the mouseover content is manually inputted, but since Microsoft acquired Powerset (http://www.powerset.com) last year, they could also pull some information about topics from it.
They should have left this kind of thing to iGoogle I think. Even if people like it, it's going to subtly dilute their image of Google being The Dead Simple choice.
Assume for the sake of argument that you agree it is a harmful feature for Google's image in the long term. In that case does making it an optional feature make any difference, beyond minimizing the damage?
Making it optional isn't "minimizing the damage", it's making a feature available to people who see it as a _positive thing_. This will improve Google's image in the eyes of its users, not harm it.
It took me a couple months of using Bing to figure this out, but if you mouse over the little copyright symbol in the bottom-right of the image, it will tell you who took the picture and what it is of.
Well, the point is that now I can have a hubble deep field image as my background for google search, which is a enough reason for me to stay logged in to my google account at work, which I normally don't.
If I want to look at one of my own pretty pictures, or some other picture I've chosen myself, I'll just make it my desktop background.