Whoa. Shit just got real.

Google have a post on their blog entitled “Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results - and denies it”. It’s a pretty interesting post that explains how Google set up search results for nonsense terms in Google, then repeatedly searched for them using IE8. After a week or two, Bing began returning the same results for these nonsense terms.

Microsoft responded with “We do not copy Google’s results” and then later with this post which implies that they sorta kinda do.

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webkitbits:

“I live in the browser most of the day, and every time I have to leave that to run something that’s not browser-based, that’s actually more annoying than positive. So our current thinking is to keep it in tabs.”

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Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director at Chrom OS, Google talks Chrome OS, HTML5, and the future of software

Slightly concerned that the Chrome OS Engineering Director apparently spends all day surfing the web, and gets annoyed on the rare occasions he has to run pesky development tools.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for browser-based productivity software (Google’s suite saves me a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with docs and emails), but Google’s party line gets a bit tiring when we’re expected to believe that Google’s software engineers spend “most of the day” in a browser. The day I can run Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Lightwave, Eclipse, Visual Studio, WinSCP and iTunes in a browser is the day that Google’s developers spend most of the day working on the web.

Maybe I just missed it all, but everyone seems to be failing to go mad about a key new feature in Google’s Picasa. Namely facial recognition.

At a basic level, it’s fairly old hat. My digital camera can recognise faces, and puts little boxes around them on the preview screen in real time. Picasa is a little more ingenious, and can recognise the faces of individuals, as opposed to just a generic face shape.

It starts scanning your photo library, and throws up a few faces. “Who’s this?” it asks. “Why, that’s Mike” I reply, and attach him to a contact in my Google Contacts. I do that for a few more people. Then, it starts to get clever: “What about these five guys? Are these also Mike?”. “Uh, yes, they are”. “Okay… I’ve found 20 more face I think are Mike’s, are there right?”. And so on.

It doesn’t catch every face, and still produces a heck of a lot of “I just don’t know how these people are” responses. Even then, if you attach the unknowns to an existing contact, it immediately adds in a few more saying “Ah, then I guess these ones are that person too?”

This is why I love the software that Google makes. As a programmer, I firmly believe in making the software do as much basic reasoning as possible to avoid clicks for the user. Google believes that too, but they have an army of geniuses (or the cash to buy an army of geniuses) to take that to the next level. Remember how Facebook lets you identify contacts by putting a box around them in photos? This is the autopilot version of that, and exactly the kind of thing computers should be doing for us: we give them the information, they sort it for us.

I know the idea of full facial recognition isn’t brand new, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used in a piece of consumer software, as opposed to being used to misidentify terrorist suspects in technology trails for airports.

Google may have become basically the same as Microsoft these days, but there’s a key difference: Google make free software that I want to use. Microsoft’s Live bundle doesn’t hold a candle to Google’s Software Pack.