Why Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign Is Childish

Well, in spite of the silliness of those commercials, lately I have been creeped out when I start getting blasted by adverts from all over the web based on something I recently searched on. Often times, I'll quickly look up something / fact check what I've read in an article (most recently was "longevity insurance" annuities and reverse mortgages), and now I'm getting a whole bunch of ads aimed at older / retired people on many sites that I visit. And these ads have nothing to do with me, except that I happened to fact-check something a couple times. Kind of makes me want to re-think any of my web searches, and do them in a private browsing window.

I can't really say why this bothers me -- maybe it is because I know that their ad matching algorithm gave inaccurate results (so it grates on my OCD, maybe?), or maybe it just feels like I'm being stalked by people trying to sell me something.

"Scroogled" is used by Googlers ironically as in "Scroogled again: only three flavors of soy-free vegan whipped cream in the cafeteria today!"

There was some direct evidence that Microsoft was pulling over some of the google spell correction from internet explore as I remember. Google added some universally unique spell corrections and in short order they were pulled over to Bing.

I remember that there were claims, the claims I read were not directly from google, of copying search results as well, but the evidence was not as direct or as damning as for the spelling correction.

IIRC it turned out to be a side effect of their "toolbar" data collection. If most people using googles toolbar would use bing they would see a similar effect. But calling it "they get search results from google" is stretching the truth. Of course why anyone would submit all their surf history to any of those big brother companies (M or G) in the first place is a complete mystery.

But overall bing is not too bad. It's a quite respectable search search engine on its own right. It's not quite as good as google, but I use it regularly to work around some google misfeatures. What really annoys me in google is that you cannot cutnpaste PDF urls from search result. I'm sure there is some workaround, but it's easier to just temporarily switch to bing in the search bar to solve it (and it typically finds the same thing) bing seems to also have less spam.

"how different is it to write a chromebook app than an android one?"

I almost bought my wife a chromebook for christmas, I researched this a bit for fun. Might buy one for myself too.

Basically you google for "how to write chromebook app" (or Bing, LOL who am I kidding no one uses bing) and eventually get to

https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index

You probably want "packaged app" which unsurprisingly turns out to be "how to write a chrome browser app"

I thought it was all pretty interesting and have a few ideas to try.

"I really don't want another platform to write native apps for"

Careful careful, thats how cobol programmers and the like get stagnant and then unemployable. I'm not saying dive in head first, but sticking a toe in to see what the water is like, is perfectly reasonable. Go have some fun.

In practice, lets be realistic, its 2013 soon 2014, 99% of "apps" use web pages as the presentation layer. I'm not going to write anything to use gmail or hangouts or google drive or facebook or a bazillion other end user applications. 99% of her time osx is just a Chrome bootloader for my wife, so I'm thinking of moving it out of the way...