Apathy Sketchpad

Can I just mention the best thing in Wednesday’s Metro (aside obviously from my letter): page twenty, right column, right at the bottom. I have reproduced the story here, almost in its entirety:

A [Serbian] butcher who turned up late for work stabbed himself to death as he shook his fists at his boss while carrying two carving knives.

Isn’t that great?

The title of this rant is also the slogan of Windows Live Search, or as it will be known from here on in, Microsoft Google. Because let’s face facts, it’s Google, but done by Microsoft.

So what does that suggest? It does exactly the same thing as Google, but looks nicer and runs more slowly. Correct. Oh, and of course it’s designed for IE rather than for Firefox (though it does work very well in Firefox, albeit also very slowly). Lastly, it says “Is this helpful?” everywhere and not “Learn more”.

So it is any good? I’ve net really had much chance to test the usefulness of its results, but I’ve had a play with the interface, and drawn the following conclusions:

The advanced search functions appear without loading a new page. Very nice.

The image search “sidebar” thing is clever, but very, very, very slow. And I’m running it on a computer bought two months ago. Not good. Use Google instead. Its Jeteye style scratchpad is quite clever, too, but I’ve not tried it out properly. Also I like that it can search for images the exact size of your desktop, though what that means on my dual-monitor setup is not clear (not least because Windows is awful at handline desktop images on two screens of different dimensions).

Every single aspect of it is stolen shamelessly from Google, leading me to believe it isn’t as good, because the original is usually the best. Seriously, they search the web, news, images, and maps. They have a video section. And half the site is still in beta. Some search results are indented and marked “show more results from”. It’s Google. It even has options called Strict, Moderate and no SafeSearch. That’s blatant theft.

The image search has a “feature” where if you hover the mouse over an image it will display more information. I put “feature” in inverted commas because Google does this without you dragging the mouse around the screen, which might not look so nice but is infinitely more useful.

So will I be switching from Google to Microsoft Google?

No. It’s not very different and most of the differences make it worse. The bottom line is that no, the world does not need another search engine.

Nice slogan, genius.

There’s a paper in the British Dental Journal today claiming to demonstrate that “an orofacial trauma-based brief intervention can change attitudes to binge drinking among adolescent males, but not drinking behaviour”.

I don’t know what an “orofacial trauma-based brief intervention” is, but I have to assume it’s nerd-speak for a smack in the mouth. I cannot be the only person who, reading that, concluded that that experiment was probably done by mistake late at night and then justified by writing it up…

The latest Head And Shoulders advert promises that their product leaves your hair “up to 100% flake free”. So there’s no danger of anitmatter dandruff like you get with Pantene.