DailyTech - Microsoft Fought to Place Bing Search Engine in AMC's Walking Dead

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Internet Microsoft Fought to Place Bing Search Engine in AMC's Walking Dead
Jason Mick (Blog) - October 12, 2011 4:49 AM

13 comment(s) - last by JessSayin'.. on Oct 15 at 11:51 AM

Perhaps they should have instead pushed zombie Ballmer?

More dead than alive, its life is an endless search as it unable to sustain itself in a natural fashion. It is oft outwitted by its crafty foes. And there seems little hope that it can be cured.

We're talking about the flesh-hungry antagonists AMC's hit zombie themed drama "The Walking Dead", of course. But the description could perhaps be applied to Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Bing search engine, which has seen little gain in market share over the last year. With Microsoft recently announcing that the service may never be profitable, it continues to pour its fiscal flesh in trying to keep this site walking.

Part of that effort is in advertising the site, and ironically it selected none other than "The Walking Dead" to try to pitch a pricy product placement. Sean Carver, one of Bing's marketing directors, in an interview with The New York Times, recalls, "We pitched them last year where maybe the characters could find a library with a generator and do a Bing search."

Bing's effort to take a bite out of AMC's show time was beaten back, though, when Melissa Wasserman, the vice president of advertising sales marketing at AMC informed Microsoft that the survivors of the zombie attacks were living in a world without computers or smart phones -- hence making a data center-driven search engine an unacceptable plot departure -- even if that search engine happened to be the walking dead of the search world.

But Bing didn't go away empty handed. It instead brokered a deal to air a joint ad promotion, which it's dubbing the "Stagger on Role Sweepstakes". One lucky winner will get to appear as a zombie in Season 3 of the show, along with travel expenses paid for the trip and $500 cash.

Like the zombies in The Walking Dead, it seems unlikely that Bing will ever be able to enjoy a peaceful, prosperous life. But at least Microsoft is keeping occupied coming up with creative new ways to try to insert "Bing" into the "Google" (Inc. (GOOG)) dominated discussion.

Here's the promo:

Source: The New York Times

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Bing it!

By OoklaTheMok on 10/12/2011 9:08:04 AM , Rating: 2

Why are you bashing Bing? Have you used it recently? Bing has come along way recently where Bing results now are equivalent or better than googles. I have switched from using google exclusively to using Bing almost exclusively because beyond the standard search results being on par, there are other parts of Bing that are just better than google such as the "shopping results". Funny in that google is now starting to copy Bing features.

RE: Bing it!

By kleinma on 10/12/2011 9:23:15 AM , Rating: 2

I also use bing as my primary search and fall back to google when I need to see if there are better results with that engine.

I hardly ever have to actually go to google, bing usually gets the job done. I tend to support it because google doesn't really need any support and I don't want to see only one search engine powering the web (especially when it may prove true they skew their search results to put their products ahead of their competition)

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RE: Bing it!

By drycrust3 on 10/12/2011 10:33:43 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Bing results now are equivalent or better than googles.

To me, one of the big things Google does is iGoogle, where I can set up my own layout for how Google will look for me, and I can select what news, what blogs, what weather, and what art work appears on the screen when I access their website (which is also my home screen).
For example, I hardly ever go to Daily Tech's main screen, I look at what their iGoogle app is telling me are their articles of interest and click on the ones that interest me (such as happened with this article).
Whether Bing's results are better than Google's or not is mostly irrelevant because usually I find the information I want within the first dozen of Google's results. The most common reason I use Bing is because Google returns a nil result or the results are all heading in the wrong direction, at which point I would try a range of other search engines and not just Bing.
In fact, one of the main reasons I did use Bing was because (aside from the ease of remembering their name) they can be added to Firefox's search engine box. There is no such box on the Chromium browser, which means they have to take their chances.

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RE: Bing it!

By kleinma on 10/12/2011 5:58:01 PM , Rating: 2

Microsoft has a similar service to iGoogle, it used to be part of their live services, but they moved it to their MSN service.

So it is my[dot]msn[dot]com, which features a bing search bar at the top for web searches.

Granted, I think it would be smart of MS to make my.bing.com go to the same place, but whatever, I don't work there ;)

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RE: Bing it!

By FaaR on 10/12/11, Rating: 0

RE: Bing it!

By B3an on 10/12/2011 1:44:23 PM , Rating: 1

LOL and you think "google" is any better??

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RE: Bing it!

By sviola on 10/13/2011 9:07:31 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
Why bash bing? Well, for starters, it has the stupidest name EVER, which is good enough a reason in my book.

Odd naming for search engines are a trend:

yahoo, google, bing and others...

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So, in a series where the world as we know it......

By Natch on 10/12/2011 8:28:52 AM , Rating: 2

....is mostly dead, they not only find a library with a generator, but also a fully functional internet? Exactly what is powering all of that infrastructure, after all this time??

Bing is useful, occasionally, if I'm looking for search results that are slightly different than Google's....but honestly, if you were a survivor of the zombie apocalypse, found this mythical library with a generator AND a fully functional internet, and someone went to pull up a search engine, wouldn't you more likely say, "Just Google it"??

RE: So, in a series where the world as we know it......

By Reclaimer77 on 10/12/2011 11:15:23 AM , Rating: 1

lol Yeah, Zombie scenarios are full of problems like that. It gets old after a while. I mean, we're a country with like everyone owning a gun, a vehicle, and a military state guard unit in every town. Not to mention a big ass standing army and mechanized force. Zombies are slow, stupid, can't use weapons or vehicles. So how in the hell would they be able to kill like almost EVERYONE like in AMC's Walking Dead and other shows/movies? It's bull crap.

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RE: So, in a series where the world as we know it......

By GreenEnvt on 10/12/2011 11:27:33 AM , Rating: 2

True, however you can get a bit more believable if they use a concept where it's not the zombie bite that infects. Some zombie plots involve everyone getting some virus that is benign until you die, then it reanimates you. So in that case, with the thousands of people dying each day, it gets a bit more plausible. Still however, I doubt armies would have difficulty dealing with such issues.

I'm wondering if walking dead might use this concept. I haven't read the books so I don't know. I thought they hinted at it in the finale last season when the guy checks their blood and just says "no surprises" when they ask how it looks.

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RE: So, in a series where the world as we know it......

By ClownPuncher on 10/12/2011 2:48:31 PM , Rating: 2

Or, we could just start expecting some sort of... creative thought in our entertainment. I actually like the show, but it's not really funny to tag zombies onto every little god damn game or show.

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