The Minister for the Illawarra, David Campbell, has been copping it lately over his assessment of Wollongong’s poor prospects of winning the headquarters for the massive infrastructure project.

As a senior politician David Campbell is probably inured to such unfounded criticism, but it must be particularly galling that in this instance what he is saying is clearly well founded.

However, what most observers are missing is that in all likelihood  the new headquarters will not only be giving the Illawarra a big miss, but it will also give Sydney a wide berth too and head north or south.

What is certain though is that it has got to go to a capital city.

Apart from the politics there are two basic requirements involved with this decision.  Any site must have existing ITC infrastructure, which is currently only available in capital cities, and also have ready access to a large base of skilled labour.

I am reliably informed the smart money is on Melbourne, but with a Prime Minister from Queensland, Brisbane can never be ruled out of the contest.

Put some Bing in your search!

Software giant Microsoft finally joins up with internet pioneer Yahoo! to challenge Google’s stranglehold on search

It is a good looking product with some nice features (will review in detail in a future GET CONNECTED column) and it seems to run reasonably fast so I am thinking we might finally get some true competition in the marketplace – and that has got to be good.

A colleague assures me Bing will be up and running in this country within six months although nothing is official at this stage.

I spend a lot of time talking to lots of people about search – usually local search - and it seems clear to me the average web surfer loves Google and everything about it.

You can certainly bet most of them would not wish to consider life on the web without the ubiquitous search engine being there to lend a helping hand.

But until very recently most of these people apparently thought they had little real option, although the fact is that Yahoo7, and MSN Live to a lesser extent, have been able to offer comparable search results for quite a while.

Google is reputed to have about 65 per cent of all search traffic world-wide but here in Australia the figure is even higher which underlines the close connection many local users have with this tool.

Whether the arranged ‘marriage’ between Bill Gates’s software monolith and the hesitant internet veteran Jerry Yang’s baby will deliver a truly competitive search tool seriously capable of grabbing market-share from the Mountainview boys is debatable.

Having said that, it was always going to happen, and only time will tell if the increased competition eventually translates into improved search results.

I must say I have tried Bing. But only to check out its performance on keywords which we are currently running in PPK trial campaigns, e.g. ‘abrasive blasting wollongong’, ‘term deposits sutherland’ or ‘designer glasses shellharbour’. 

And for these particular searches there is a major problem. The results being served to the search engine results page (SERP) are only the SMARTPAGE directory ‘category level’ documents, i.e. they do not drill down to the actual file. This means searchers will always have to click a further time to reach their ultimate destination.

Frankly, I don’t think it will happen. People are far too busy and if they get this functionality now it will be a prerequisite before a significant number of users will even contemplate a permanent move away from the ‘do no evil’ guys from Stanford.

What’s more, they shouldn’t have to, considering Yahoo7 and MSN Live were delivering this well before the new kid on the block, Bing, arrived so I would suggest they both know how to fix this bug, and should do so without delay.