Microsoft does not have a particular luck in competing with Google and is trying to enslave world with their third search engine: bing. So far, we had Windows Live Search and MSN Search. I’ve tried to use both of them for few times – each time the result was typical worthless trash. Bing was designed to be different. It was launched by Microsoft in June this year and its main advantage should be intelligent search of certain information (for example a query about the status of the flight will return the status of a flight rather than links to pages with the status on them). Here again bing has very serious competitor – WolframAlpha, but this is not about it today.

More about bing, you can read in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(search_engine).

Now, time to move to a situation which in my humble opinion is 100% fraud by Microsoft (I am definitely not against Microsoft as a producer of software – I use their software and I am happy with it).

The popularity of search engines is assessed on the basis of market share – number of web entries (which is proportional to the number of searches) from the search engines in relation to the inputs from all search engines. I noticed recently (past few days) a large increase in the number of entries from a bing search engine (referrer address like “http://bing.com/search?q =…”). I decided to take a closer look (not quite believed that this increase is natural – and surprisingly I was right).

Since bing launched in June, I’ve noted 102 entries to my blog form bing (note that bing is not popular I Poland at all). 5 Polish-speaking and 97 English-speaking users. While the Polish entries seemed to be 100% real: a different browsers, meaningful search terms, different IP addresses, different search parameters (additional variables in referrer), the remaining 97 entries seemed to by fraud, as I mentioned earlier.

Three reasons:

1. Words and phrases search correspond to what can be found on the blog. But does anyone believe that the search for phrase “google” led to this blog (from the first page of results, because there is no corresponding variable in the address – referrer for the page number)? Immediately you can see, that those referrers aren’t real. (it’s very simple to open any website with specially prepared and not real referrer). Among the 97 entries, there are various terms: “latex”, “click”, “meter”, “comet”, “damage”, and others. As you can see they are just single words found in the body of the blog.
2. All entries used IE6 with Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 – suspicious, right?
3. The first two points could only direct us to different “fraud” ideas. The most interesting is the source of all visits. The IP address did almost not repeat, but all were similar: “65.55 .*.*”. I checked their origin with geo-localization software. All of them were located in Redmond, WA in the U.S.. Yes, this city is the headquarters of Microsoft. Analysis of data packet route (tracert) also shows that Microsoft is owner of those IPs.

If someone is not yet convinced that this is a fraud, I would like to clarify that there is no meaningful explanation for such action as Microsoft’s attempted. They are simply trying to improve very poor position (statistically) of bing among others (mainly google). So “serious” company like Microsoft should not afford such stupid procedure.

Feel welcome to express opinions.

This article is also available in Polish.

This is first post in English in our blog. I was quite a long time since I’ve last written anything in English so please excuse me for my poor grammar!
Today was quite an exciting day for Gmail (for those who don’t know what I’m talking about: it broke down for quite long time). Gmail is really very important tool in my everyday work. I receive lots of emails from lots of people and only Google mail can handle it well. Since I’ve started using Gmail spam is not a problem anymore: it’s just gone. I could say a lot of great things about Gmail, but it’s not a point right now. Now I would like to list some features I’m missing, that could make Gmail even better.

1st accounts

I have four different email accounts I use every day (private, business…). All my emails from all accounts are delivered to my Gmail account (it is great that Gmail can do that!). Each account has its own label – super. Problem begins when I try to send email from Gmail using one of my other addresses. It works, but my recipients (depends on their email client) can sometimes see that sender is strange (one address by other) – not well. Here comes my first Gmail wish: I would like to be able to send emails using Gmail web interface through server other than Gmail.

2nd labels

Labels are also great. First I thought folders are better, but now I believe in labels. I use several labels. One of them is named “projects”. I put there all emails that correspond to projects I’m responsible of. There are lots of projects and lots of emails to one project. I would like to have different labels to each project, but that would produce too much deferent labels. Here comes my second Gmail wish: I would like to have sub labels in Gmail.

3rd contacts

Contacts wish: I would like to have application on my desktop to sync contacts between Gmail, Outlook, PDA and mobile phone.

4th tasks

I’m missing connection between Gmail and Google Calendar (which is also great). My wish: I would like to be able to add short note to email such as “take care of that till Monday”.

5th Google Calendar

Wish: I would like to be able to “attach” messages from Gmail to my appointments in Google Calendar.

Conclusion

Those are my major whishes to Google about Gmail. Dear Google – please consider them!
Please comment if you agree or disagree with me! Once again: sorry for my poor English!