There’s a Bing ding dong, after Microsoft over-enthusiastically encourages Chrome users to stop using Google, and silence hits the British Library as it shares its story of a ransomware attack. Yes, it’s a new “Smashing Security” podcast with me and Carole Theriault.
Thanks to Kolide by 1Password, Vanta, and Kiteworks for supporting this episode!
Remember when I said Bingʼs index is around 2 milliard pages? Finally, the stats at WorldWideWebSize.com agree, possibly because #Bing has stopped lying about the number of results it has. That does make Bing smaller than @Mojeek.
The electricity and water use required by data centres is becoming cause for concern. Iowa and Ireland are calling for moratoriums on new development projects. Microsoft’s global water consumption grew 34% from 2021 to 2022. And estimates say that around 80% of content in data centres could be stuff we never use again, stored by default to consume energy in perpetuity for no purpose at all.
Super-disappointed when testing Bing's Deep Search the other day. If "deep" means blank screens & error pages, while waiting over a minute each time to see that, then I'll skip Deep Search next time. I know they are working on improving this, but I think it's a bit confusing for users now (even when it works). Eager to see how this improves over time.
I pinged Microsoft's Mikhail Parakhin about this on Friday & he responded that they are working on it...
My tweet after testing: "I've been testing this with several queries. It's terrible IMO. It took over a minute per query (yes over 60 seconds to get results), failed several times (returning a blank screen with an error message), and when results were returned, I didn't really understand the difference between the default results and Deep Search. There is no way this can roll out in its current form. It's horrible. Nobody will use this. Nobody."
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