This is Ridiculous, Microsoft

"TheRealBicycleBuck" (therealbicyclebuck) 09/04/2019 at 15:15 • Filed to: None

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I get that you fellas are all into advertising and you really, really want me to start using Bing, but sending me an e-mail completely devoid of text is just a bad move. What if I were visually impaired and required a reader to decipher your message? I know you want to send all of your content as images so you can track my every move, but I’m just not falling for it, no matter what “rewards” I’ll receive just for clicking on it.

Try again with something I can read without enabling images in my e-mail and I may consider reading it.

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 15:27

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When g oogle changed its image search layout (bad google!), I thought I’d try Bing. But every time I search for something I would get porn in the results, no matter how I tried to filter it. Not that I mind porn (to a certain extent), but it’s not exactly what I want showing up on my home desktop when the kids are home.

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > ttyymmnn 09/04/2019 at 15:36

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Bing: The Search Engine for Horny People (tm)

facw > ttyymmnn 09/04/2019 at 15:37

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I’m somewhat angry at google for changing the image search view pane (not at all portrait monitor friendly now).

I’m extremely angry at google for getting rid of the specific image size search options (and also for having “large” be pretty low resolution). I’m also somewhat annoyed at them for relabeling “animated” to “GIF”, especially since people are moving away from gifs to more modern formats (I assume it still finds these, but I don’t like the dumbing down of the label).

I don’t use bing enough to have opinions on its pornography.  

ttyymmnn > If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent 09/04/2019 at 15:37

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Should have called it Sch wing™

ttyymmnn > facw 09/04/2019 at 15:39

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I use GIS a ton for my aviation stuff. This new format sucks very hard. Maybe just because the old format was around for so long, but the new version seems unintuitive and clumsy.

McMike > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 15:39

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facw > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 15:42

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If it’s a legit email, I hope they at least MIME’d in a plain text version for ADA compliance (if not someone will sue them, there’s an active industry for suing non-compliant companies for profit. Good that things get fixed, but it’s still a bit shady).

Having images off is a losing battle though, most clients show images (at least from “trustworthy” parties) by default these days. The people who turn them off are no-longer numerous enough for most marketers to worry about.

facw > ttyymmnn 09/04/2019 at 15:44

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Yeah I don’t like it, but I don’t think anyone else is really strong competition (bing is there, and occasionally useful, but I don’t think anyone matches even this reduced quality Google Image Search). Personally I would love to see Google spend their image search time on something more useful like automatically filtering out water marked images (especially the stock image type).

Mercedes Streeter > ttyymmnn 09/04/2019 at 16:08

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But every time I search for something I would get porn in the results, no matter how I tried to filter it.

BRB, going to Bing “Airbus A380 vs A-10 Thunderbolt II ”...

TheRealBicycleBuck > ttyymmnn 09/04/2019 at 16:10

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Dang acronyms. GIS - Geographic Information Systems. The software one uses for doing cartography and map analysis (both of which I used to teach and have used almost daily for over 20 years). Relevant to ttyymmnn because he once aspired to be a cartographer.

GIS - Google Image Search. A way for looking for images similar to or matching a source image. Current version has more than one Oppo upset.

ttyymmnn > Mercedes Streeter 09/04/2019 at 16:10

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I will await your report. Rule 34, after all. 

TheRealBicycleBuck > facw 09/04/2019 at 16:11

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I turned off images in e-mail when I learned how to track response rates with a single-pixel image.

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 16:22

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JIZ - Never mind

facw > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 16:31

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Oh yeah, they are definitely tracking you... They will of course track you anyway if you click any link in the email, but they (probably) won’t if you have images off and don’t interact with the email in any way . Most people would rather have the images though, it’s not like every single thing you do on the web isn’t tracked anyway.

TheRealBicycleBuck > facw 09/04/2019 at 16:45

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I like to break direct marketing where I can.

I took a course on web design long, long ago . The professor’s primary technique for staying on the “cutting edge” was to surf porn sites and examine their code. This was back when ASP was on the rise and he was proselytizing it as the best way to keep someone else from looking at your code and for us to track users. 

facw > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 16:59

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Yep, I don’t abbreviate Google Image Search (regardless of how annoyed with it I am), because GIS was already a well established acronym (albeit one that most people probably don’t run into frequently).

Chariotoflove > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 18:14

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The only time my search engine changes to Bing is when a bit of malware gets on my computer and forces it. Then I have to remove it.

This happens to my home computer sometimes.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Chariotoflove 09/04/2019 at 18:37

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Microsoft will reward you for using Bing to search. I found a bit of Python code which would initiate random searches on Bing and installed it on a linux build running on a Raspberry Pi. It was a fun little project that netted me some   Reward points before I shut it down. Rewards are capped at 250 per day for searching and 150 per day for browsing. If you reach the cap every day, you earn about 40 cents, or about $12 a month, so it really isn’t worth the electricity or bandwidth to let the system run.

Chariotoflove > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 19:10

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How are said rewards collected?

TheRealBicycleBuck > Chariotoflove 09/04/2019 at 19:18

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I honestly have no idea. The few that I have are sitting in a Microsoft account somewhere.

Chariotoflove > TheRealBicycleBuck 09/04/2019 at 19:32

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Microsoft credit is about as useful as Confederate currency to me.