If We Get Lost, Don't Send the State to Search for Us

The Washington state Department of Information Services has chosen Binghoo! to serve as the search engine for the state's website, says TechFlash. But the DIS spokesperson claims it wasn't about snuggling up to Microsoft: "the bottom line was to get the best search engine we can get." Seriously? What were your fucking metrics? Bing is almost two months old, and Google's search dominance is unquestioned. (We're fine with them picking Binghoo!, btw--just try to be proud of it.) We note that this is the same DIS that thinks access.wa.gov is a better URL than wa.gov. That "access" makes all the difference--it's...um..."accessier."

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By MvB in News on July 30, 2009 2:00 PM

Comments [rss]

jdavin

Why are you calling it Binghoo? I don't get the joke... Binghoo doesn't come up as any known word or slang as far as I can discern on some web searches...

FYI your claim that "Bing is almost two months old, and Google's search dominance is unquestioned." is pretty inaccurate, and at the very least misleading. Bing is the latest version of Live Search, which was MSN Search before that. The underlying technology has been worked on and iterated for 5+ years. Bing was a rebranding and a release of some new features. Also, Google's *market share* dominance is unquestioned, but their *search relevancy* dominance is not unquestioned. Should people make their decisions solely based on what the majority of other people do? No. Then no one would own an Apple computer... :)

Audrey

Bing + Yahoo! = Binghoo! Do the maths.

Weazul

Being in IS/IT doesn't mean you make decisions, it means you implement them. =/

Micah

I had the pleasure of going to the University of Washington Informatics Capstone presentations last month, and one of the students' projects was a blind comparison of the top three search engines. People typed in a search query, it randomly chose Google, MSN (now Bing), or Yahoo, and delivered the answers (all in the same format, so the user wouldn't know which search engine gave the answers). The users were then asked to rate the quality of the search results.

There was no statistically significant difference between the quality of each search engine.

I'm not much of a Microsoft fan, and I don't know if I'd call DIS "cutting edge," but I can see how this could be a legitimate move. I wouldn't be surprised at all if most DIS employees have a stronger background in Microsoft technologies (Windows server, .NET, etc.) than technologies Google's often more aligned with (Linux/Apache, PHP, etc.), so it would make sense to pick a technology that works for their skillsets.