Yahoo! Big Thinkers India Series in Pune

Yahoo! Research conducts a series of lectures quarterly under the Yahoo! Big Thinkers India Series. The lectures are conducted in Bangalore, however for the first time Yahoo hosted the April 2011 lecture outside Bangalore, in LeMeridian hotel in Pune. The lecture titled ‘web retrieval: The surprising role of users’ was conducted by Yeolle Maarek -a senior Director of Yahoo! Research.

Yeolle explained the role of users in a pretty nice way-it reminded me of film 21 in which Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) puts up a stupendous job in his opening scene of the class.

Although the session was scheduled on a weekday (yersterday), we went to attend the session. The session proved to be a catalyst to think about something that we as web users should care about and was a good lecture in terms of content as well as presentation rather than those boring  meetings. Apart from this, the attendees got a nice and heavy snacks-the snacks in LeMeridian was really tasty, a key chain and a Yahoo! diary:) I know some people came solely for these things

I hope the video of the session will be available on Bigthinkers site soon. The recorded sessions of previous lectures are available in the archives.

Can Bing be another verb like Google?

I have been working on Microsoft technologies (including latest products) for last two years, but my experience with Bing (Microsoft’s revamped search engine; formerly known as Live Search or MSN search) has not been good. The number of search results is poor, it takes more time to return and display search results, among other things. Microsoft has great expectations (more than expectations it is their quest to outdo Google in online search space) from Bing.

As New York Times reported:

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”

The Inquisitr author Steven Hodson reports why Bing is a stupid ass name for a search engine.

To quote James Devlin:

One of the oft-cited reasons for Google’s success, other than the fact that it offered a decent ground floor product at a time when the world was full of search engine suckery, is that it had a name which was susceptible to being immortalized as a household verb. To Google is to search the web and to search the web is to Google.

Microsoft desperately wants this for Bing.

And goes on to explain the reasons for why Bing is the wrong name.

One interesting point is that, Bing is a recursive acronym – “Bing Is Not Google” same as GNU (GNU’s not Unix).

Only time will tell, if Bing can stand up to be compared with Google. Let’s wait and watch!