I can’t honestly say I’m surprised, but I can say I’m dismayed as I’ve heard good things about Bing…

However, Microsoft has been found to be skewing results in it’s Bing Decision Engine, which now provides search for Yahoo as well and provides 20% of the search market.

Bing Search Tainted by Pro-Microsoft Results

In the examples given, a search for “Why is Windows so expensive?” turned up results for asking why Macs are so expensive.  Similarly, when asked if Microsoft is evil, it would link to articles where Google was portrayed as evil.  Google queries – including asking if Google was evil – did their job and returned appropriate results.

Microsoft has cleaned up these certain examples, but what worries me is Microsoft’s tampering with the results which may be as of yet unnoticed.  Could they hide a PR faux-pas?  Could they hide news of more bugs?

I had been tempted to try Bing as I’ve heard some good things about it (mostly “It’s better than Live Search”, but I’d have to give it a fair shake before knocking it) but this has trampled this temptation.  Too bad Microsoft.

Talk About A Bombshell (Which everyone knew was coming eventually, but we pretend to be surprised anyways)

Google, the big little company we all know and love, has decided that a logical extension of their vision for Google Chrome is the Chrome Operating System.  While the original Chrome was marketed as being similar to an OS in how it handled the web, Google decided that the desktop OS is built for an age where people are tied to desktop applications.  Google says that ChromeOS will be a lightweight, fast-to-boot-fast-to-run OS that focuses on getting people to the web.  While aimed at netbooks, it will also be available for desktops and laptops (so presumably not a Moblin-like interface).

While it will be Linux-based (like Android but seperate), ChromeOS will build many things from the ground up.  Now, I probably won’t wind up using ChromeOS (this is purely speculatory with no screenshots or anything) as I like the full-fledged Desktop OS provided by Ubuntu, but because the project is open source and builds on open source projects there will be a lot of new material coming in to the FLOSS ecosystem which will inevitably be picked up by the mainstream Linuxes.

I incorrectly reported on Twitter (based on a misunderstanding of Gizmodo) that it would be able to run Windows and OS X apps.  As far as I can tell, there won’t be apps per say but rather web-based applications which can be run on any operating system from any modern browser.  This, needless to say, makes more sense, though I am dissappointed because geting Win/Mac compatibility in an open source project would mean Win/Mac compatibility for the Linux universe.

So yes, I’m excited.  Can’t wait to see where this goes.  I am a fan of Chrome as a browser (if it only did Flash it’d be my default on Linux – it’s alpha is great) and I’m sure Google will do a great job on ChromeOS

Google has commissioned 11 short films to celebrate it’s utterly amazing Open Source browser, Google Chrome.

I’ll let them speak for themselves:  First mine (and Lifehacker’s) favourite.  Honestly, they should  make this a TV commercial.

Cool, no?

Here are some other cool ones.  This first one I think is really aimed at the Open Sourceitude of Chrome Continue reading