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“Things just seem to happen to people who don’t drink Wilkins”

So says the character “Wilkins” just after his best fiend “Wontkins” once again meets his maker after proclaiming a distaste for Wilkins Coffee. Who knew Jim Henson could put together such a psychotically violent set of advertisements?

There are many more compilations of wilkins coffee ads up on youtube. They’re all worth a look. These 8 second TV commercials are the work of Jane and Jim Henson, with Jim doing both the Kermit-like voice of the character “Wilkins” and also the Waldorf-like voice of the grumpier “Wontkins”.

If these commercials ran today, they’d be very effective. I’d eschew water for Wilkins Coffee, wear the T-shirt, buy a gun¹, and “convince” everyone I knew to drink Wilkins. Yeah.

1. Other weapons used in the ads: cannon, club, explosives, arrows, motor vehicles, trees. [↩]

The other day I unexpectedly received a CD in the mail, from a sender whose name I didn’t recognize. The band: “Letters vs. Numbers”, album: “Bone Tired”. The back of the sleeve was a handwritten list of other recipients along with a printed request that the recipient rip the album to their computer, add their name and location to the list, and send it to someone else.

Always one to obediently follow directions, I ripped, signed, and sent. I also listened, and damned if it isn’t a great little album. Here’s the first track, “Forget Everything”, for your streaming or downloading pleasure¹ :

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download mp3

I’d highly recommend that you receive this album by mail from a friend or an anonymous source. Failing that, the mysterious band² has a website, a myspace page³, and the album is available at both the iTunes music store and the Amazon MP3 store.

1. Hit the triangle button to play the track in your browser, or the download link to download the mp3 file [↩]
2. Their myspace page doesn’t list the names of band members, their number, or even a location. [↩]
3. The album can be listened to on the page in that icky myspace music player widget. [↩]

I remember back in the early days of the internet, before Google’s search engine produced results that were so clearly better than everyone else’s¹, I immediately favored it because their uncluttered webpage and the search results loaded at lightning-speed when compared to the competition.

These days Google is king of search and their remaining competitors are also-rans. Microsoft, in a major play for the search market has revamped their search engine. Not content to merely improve the engine, Microsoft has also decided to change its name.² So The engine previously known as “MSN Search”, then “Windows Live Search”, then “Live Search”, has been rechristened to “Bing”. I maintain that they were undoubtedly inspired to use the name “Bing” as an homage to this great moment in the film “Groundhog Day”.³

My cursory test of Bing shows that it’s a decent search engine, but I don’t have to scan as far through Google’s results to find links I consider relevant. For example, in a search for “Bing” on both engines, Google returns Microsoft’s search engine’s page as its first non-sponsored result⁴ and the wikipedia article on the service as the 3rd result. Microsoft Bing’s results first show several “News about Bing” links at the top, followed by a link to the Bing page, and then the “Bing Crosby” article at Wikipedia. The wikipedia page on Bing is two links later, halfway down the page. Since I was not looking for news articles on Bing, Google’s search results were better for me, with everything I wanted within the first 3 results. This isn’t a dealbreaker. I could still find what I needed in Bing’s results, and I’d be shocked if Microsoft doesn’t continue to improve their service –starting with algorithms that move more frequently-clicked results for a given query to the top of the list⁵.

Google edges ahead in this cursory test, but not enough to cause me to scowl and turn away from Bing in disgust. How about speed? I cleared my browser cache, opened up Safari’s Network Timeline, and loaded google.com and bing.com one after the other. The results are telling:

A proper fail. Bing’s page is obviously bloated compared to Google’s, and took about 5x longer to appear in my browser and 10x longer to completely load than Google (4.26 seconds vs. 478ms). This isn’t just due to Bing including 82kb of pretty pictures in the front page, there’s also a significant difference in the speed at which results pages load. When I executed an identical search on both pages, Google’s results appeared in less than a second and Bing’s again took several times longer. I’d consider such a difference in the metric known in tech circles as “Teh Snappy” a dealbreaker, but for two factors:

1. Bing organizes its search results, particularly product and video search results, in interesting ways. I have yet to properly experiment with this.
2. Microsoft pays users⁶ to use their search engine to shop for products. Yay, money.

So for now, I’ll occasionally use Bing for net searches for the sake of variety and experimentation, and I always use Bing as a gateway to eBay or other online vendors, so that I get money back for purchases made (amounts vary — I think the cashback for eBay purchases is around 8%). 25% of the purchase price of my iPhone was given back to me due to my use of this cashback feature back when the engine was called “Live Search”. I like to think that Microsoft paid me to buy an iPhone, but the reality is probably much more complicated.

To my mind, Bing isn’t a home run, but it’s interesting, particularly if they continue to pay me to use it. That may sound like faint and cynical praise, but it’s more than I can say of any search engine that’s tried to compete with Google in years. I look forward to seeing how the engine develops.

1. I remember being partial to huskysearch, savvysearch, and metacrawler in the days pre-Google. [↩]
2. This can probably be read as a tacit acknowledgement by Microsoft that there are few users of the previous incarnations of the search engine to confuse. Bing! [↩]
3. Or perhaps the name change is just Microsoft’s way of stimulating the “product branding consultant” sector of the economy. Bing! [↩]
4. And also as the sole sponsored result. Microsoft is paying to advertise their search engine in the search results of their chief competitor’s search engine. [↩]
5. If Mr. Crosby is really a more popular result than the article on their search engine, MSFT’s marketing team needs to work harder. Perhaps an ad in which a couple listen to a Bing Crosby song and then the wife vomits on the husband? Bing! [↩]
6. Or do vendors who list products on Bing pay users for using Microsoft’s search engine to find their products? I’m not exactly sure where the money comes from or why. [↩]