Bing thinks we're WHERE? (Shallow Thoughts)

Bing thinks we're WHERE?

Lots has been written about Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. It's better than Google, it's worse than Google, it'll never catch up to Google. Farhad Manjoo of Slate had perhaps the best reason to use Bing: "If you switch, Google's going to do some awesome things to try to win you back."

But what I want to know about Bing is this: Why does it think we're in Portugal when Dave runs it under Omniweb on Mac?

In every other browser it gives the screen you've probably seen, with side menus (and a horizontal scrollbar if your window isn't wide enough, ugh) and some sort of pretty picture as a background. In Omniweb, you get a cleaner layout with no sidebars or horizontal scrollbars, a different pretty picture -- often prettier than the one you get on all the other browsers, though both images change daily -- and a set of togglebuttons that don't show up in any of the other browsers, letting you restrict results to only English or only results from Portugal.

Why does it think we're in Portugal when Dave uses Omniweb?

Equally puzzling, why do only people in Portugal have the option of restricting the results to English only?

Tags: tech, browsers, mapping, geolocation
[ 10:37 Jun 10, 2009    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]