Writing about programming
Mon Oct 14
Sun Oct 13
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# 1
Bing use-case! AKA One Weird Trick Time And Date Sites Hate
In my prior post^1 I noted that I use 'b' as a Search Shortcut for #Bing. Here is why:
* quickly view a Gregorian calendar month display, with readable days, days of the week, and weekends & holidays highlighted.
E.g. I type this into my Firefox address bar:
b dec 2024
then press return and immediately see:
https://indieweb.org/images/8/81/2024-10-13-bing-dec-2024.png (Screenshot of a Firefox private browsing window searching Bing for dec 2024 and showing a big text display of the month of December 2024 with headings for the days of the week and weekends and holidays highlighted.) https://www.bing.com/search?q=dec+2024
Only Microsoft Bing search supports this.
On other search engines (Duckduckgo, Google, Yahoo) all you get are links to random date time sites littered with ads, or blurry images of calendar months where the day numbers and holidays are too small to read.
This is something I have informally complained about to friends for years, that if you use Google Search for unit conversions, simple arithmetic, and even names of holidays, you get a nice large font “featured snippet” display of exactly your answer. But not something as simple as a month and year or even month with the implication that you want to see the current or next instance of that month.
How hard can that be to build? 12 names of months. 12 more 3-letter abbreviations. Multiplied by however number of languages supported. An intern could code that in under an hour. Someone has likely already written a regular expression for detecting this. (Aside: I tried year first, e.g. 2024 Dec, and hilariously enough that did not work to show the nice month display. So I suspect there is a minimal regular expression under the covers of this Bing feature.)
From having tried search engines for years, I was pretty convinced no one supported this.
Then on a whim I tried this in Bing recently (maybe I hadn’t before?) and to my pleasant surprise it worked.
There you have it, a use-case for Bing that only works in Bing, and reason enough to add a 'b' Search Shortcut in Firefox for Bing.
#search #webSearch #SearchShortcut #Microsoft #BingTip #searchTip #calendar #month
^1 https://tantek.com/2024/287/t2/setup-search-shortcuts-firefox - Tantek
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tantek.com
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Sat Oct 12