Well, Microsoft's Bing search system is here, and to my eye it's not delivering much Bing for the Buck.

You know that, behind closed doors, the design/idea folks were pitching true innovation, true advancement, true exploration of the still-young search function. At least you want to think so. If they weren't advocating those things, they should all be fired, right?

But from the look of the interface, the incredible, random cultural weight of the "Google list look" and its other, undesigned, early search peers, has such power that the decision makers of the so called "decision engine" opted to make its look just another copycat.

Yes they have a somewhat interesting idea of featuring a lush photograph of a world landscape or cityscape and grouping some jumping-off links around it . . . but its against a blaaaaahhh background . . . and the interface is so staid and cliched that you can tell that the traditional bugaboo of "we don't want to lose people" prevailed.

This gets to one of the deepest and saddest prejudices . . . people will call these prejudices "principles" . . . of mainstream interface design: the prejudice that the goal of the user is a strictly utilitarian information search, modeled on a physical shopping trip. In this model the user enters the space with the goal of locating retrieving one discrete object . . . a fact, an address, a pair of jeans. Programmers love this model because programming works relatively well to achieve it.

What interface designers routinely forget is that search-and-retrieve is not the only goal a user can have. And it is rarely the exclusive goal. Human beings do shop for information . . . but human beings also love to wander, to socialize (facebook), to be disoriented (travel), to be frustrated (games), to be scared (horror movies), to browse and a myriad of other goals.

The Microsoft team is not unaware of this . . . they have called Bing a "decision engine" which is a nice idea. But the look, feel and mechanics their interface does not reflect it! The Bing interface still shouts "Search and Retrieve."

It has been decades now since Muriel Cooper's astonishingly innovative interface experiments at MIT, and still we rarely see anybody taking up even her simplest ideas. Relatively drab applications like Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus are still a million times more interesting and more useful than the blah Bing-o-verse. I'm not even asking that the main interface to Bing be thinkmappish . . . even offering it as an alternative would break the cultural hammerlock the dumb Google-list look has on peoples minds.

What a missed opportunity!