Wikipedia’s New Look

I don’t see a big visual improvement, but the overall simplification of the UI and reworking the previously atrocious underlying HTML code is a step forward.

Not sure why they went with an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE instead of, say, HTML5, which is practically tailor-made for a website like Wikipedia. I’m assuming that the new layout has been in the works for so long that HTML5 didn’t seem like a viable option at the outset.

Bing

Microsoft’s new, absurdly-named, search engine has launched. Two things: How is this better than their own live.com, and how is this better than Google.com? It seems to bring nothing new to the table aside from the little popups on the right side of the results (which I’m sure is where “bing” came from. Bing! Bing! We’re lucky they don’t have a sound effect with them. It plays in my head, regardless.) and that isn’t super useful. It’s cramped, and boring at the same time.

The text-search engine space desperately needs some serious competition. Something like TinEye is doing for image search. The question is: What else do you do to search? I have a feeling the answer is not going to look anything like Google or Bing or even Wolfram Alpha.