Microsoft Bing Search Launches Early Preview 310
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of their Bing Search site earlier than expected. Microsoft's hope at putting a dent in Google's ubiquitous search presence, Bing has several new features including Bing Cashback, Bing Video, and Bing xRank. "Bing Video is really great because of the new thumbnail video feature. Try searching for E3 at Bing Video and you'll quickly see how it works. Simply hover over a video and it starts playing instantly. This is fantastic from the consumer's point of view but what about the publisher? It's almost like Microsoft is stepping on their toes by deploying video search in this manner. Would a user still click on to the site if they can watch the whole video from within the search results? Fair use definitely comes into mind here. Perhaps there should be a 30second limitation on the 'thumbnail preview?'"
Weird... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes it's the lack of information- as little as giving me the page size (7kb). Sometimes it's the margins. Bing has a left margin. Google doesn't.
I'm not saying that these differences make a BAD difference, except this: Internet users learn quickly about scams. The first time I accidentally clicked on those fake search results on an ad-search mis-direction page, I learned to pick up on these differences quickly.
In fact, it's subtle, but you can usually tell when a computer has an infection that hijacks your google results- because they don't look right (older infections changed the results, new ones redirect REAL results.. but that's a different conversation).
The point is- my mouse won't go near, let alone click, on things that I think are tricks or advertisements. For some reason, I trust google a lot. So much that my eyes are trained to see it's results and disregard others. I'm reluctant to click on bing results.
I encourage slashdot users to try bing out, and tell me it doesn't look foreign to you! Tell me you don't feel weird clicking it's results! The internet trains you quickly that you are to embrace familiarity, because you will be quickly punished for not doing so.
Re:Weird... (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand what you're saying, but I have a different perspective. Yes, the results page looks different to me but in fact that has meant I've paid more attention to it. I've been trying this out every so often and it's looking promising. Wish they'd get rid of the picture from the front page, but other than that I think I'm going to stick with this for a while. Its "Pages from the UK only" thing (insert your country here...) seems much more accurate than google.co.uk's, for instance. I might be imagining it, but it seems that way to me so far.
My current homepage is google.co.uk. I'm going to set bing.com as my homepage for a week to see how I get on with it - so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites, so looking promising at first glance. I'll see how it truly is after a longer term test.
Cheers,
Ian
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity!
Re: (Score:2)
Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again.
Oh yes, I completely agree. It took a while for Google to become so spam-infested though, so hopefully we get a reasonable break in the meantime.
I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"so far it's found things that Google didn't and missed a whole load of Google-oriented spam sites" Until the spammers note that Bing's marketshare is big enough to set their sights on. It's the whole exploits are concentrated on the most popular software out there paradigm again. Oh yes, I completely agree. It took a while for Google to become so spam-infested though, so hopefully we get a reasonable break in the meantime. I do like some aspects (video included) of this though. I find the shopping to be about as good as Google's, nothing special. Could definitely do without the noisy background, though. I crave simplicity! Indeed. Is actually the one thing putting me off making it my homepage, but I'm going to do it just to give things a try. Have been less satisfied with Google of late - not necessarily their fault as such, but there's so much targeting of them that's it's getting harder to sort wheat from chaff. Cheers, Ian
Maybe the best defense against the spammer is multiple successful search engines owned and operated by different companies. In other words, I don't like the idea of a Google monoculture any more than I like the Windows monoculture and the instant widespread success of malware that it enables. With spammers and others who want to "game" the search engines, it seems to me that the same principle applies.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Is actually the one thing putting me off making it my homepage
Add these to your adblock rules:
|http://www.bing.com/fd/hpk2/*
bing.com#DIV(class=sb_adsN)
bing.com#DIV(class=sb_adsW)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No.. (Score:2)
Bing has a calculator.
1 + 1: http://www.bing.com/search?q=1+%2B+1%0A&filt=all [bing.com]
2 * pi: http://www.bing.com/search?q=2+*+pi&go=&form=QBRE [bing.com]
2 miles in feet: http://www.bing.com/search?q=2+miles+in+feet&go=&form=QBRE [bing.com]
etc
Re:Weird... (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot: Bringing the AJAX of the "future" with the encodings of the early 90's.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, and it comes up with the wrong answer. Everybody knows that 1 + 1 = 10.
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I just tried Bing (Did Chandler approve of this?) and it does look like Google, with the exception of the left border as you state (and that weird mouseover line-with-a-dot on the right hand side)
Microsoft really did embrace
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They look pretty similar to me. I know what you are talking about, but Bing does a pretty good job of mimicking Google.
I did the "cheeseburger" test on it - if on Google, I search for Cheeseburger and the first page of links are all people trying to get me to buy cheeseburgers, I know Google's evilling up the results. If on the other hand I get all kinds of cool interesting things about cheeseburgers, I know I'm getting the "truth."
The result sets look almost the same to me and the output is bland enough.
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Foreign alright. (Score:2)
New phrase: You've been "binged". (Score:2)
#
*
Domain Not Valid
This domain is not valid. Hosted by Network Solutions.
* test.test.com
* Cached page
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My take on it is this: If it defeats the SEO bullcrap that gums up the first 2-3 pages of most Google results, then I think it will be a useful tool to me.
SEO bullcrap= When I search for HP 4600 troubleshooting, I am not searching for:
"Tired of troubleshooting your old HP 4600? Come to CrazyJimbosPrinters.com and replace that HP 4600 and stop troubleshooting! HP HEWLETTPACKARD HP PRINTER 4600 4500 3500 2840 PRINTER LASERJET
I shouldn't have to make a "-$NOUN" string a mile long just to find pertinent information. If Bing cuts out some of this fat, then they have a new user.
Alta Vista (Score:3, Insightful)
Altavista was always good enough for me
I really liked Alta Vista also - when it supported boolean queries with the NEAR keyword. I really miss that NEAR keyword, it could transform a search so easily into something worthwhile. When Alta Vista morphed into a yet another Google-style search, I moved to Google.
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Altavista was always good enough for me
I really liked Alta Vista also - when it supported boolean queries with the NEAR keyword. I really miss that NEAR keyword, it could transform a search so easily into something worthwhile. When Alta Vista morphed into a yet another Google-style search, I moved to Google.
I remember that. I used to use Altavista back when the URL was altavista.digital.com and back in the day it was great.
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I used to use Altavista back when the URL was altavista.digital.com and back in the day it was great.
Back then, the net was a bit easier on search engines, don't you think? I'd love to see how long that engine would last against today's spammers and SEO practices.
Apples and oranges, I know.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
How do you click it is?
That depends on what the definition of "is" is. :)
And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess I'll just have to Google it.
Re:And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:5, Funny)
Nope, this is a Microsoft product. You have to fucking Google it.
Re:And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how Bing stands up against Google..
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3604/3585051300_d23a37a32e_o.png [flickr.com]
Re:And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one reason why I never liked MSN Live and other MS search products. They're obviously very biased towards Microsoft products. Google, if anything, is biased towards open source & their other offerings like gmail, etc. but their search results aren't so blatantly biased that way. I purposely don't want to use a search engine run by a corporation with a wide range of products and services like MS because it's so easy for them to game the results to suit their needs. That's why I stick with Google for most of my searching and venture out to others like ask.com, yahoo.com, etc. when I want to try something different. Unless MS can demonstrate that their searches aren't biased towards their products & services then I'll continue to avoid using them.
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To be fair, people are probably searching for Microsoft products a lot more on Microsoft's sites (proportionately). So an autocomplete text box could reasonably and accurately be Microsoft biased.
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And then you get people who think Linux was made by Microsoft, just like there is people who think Microsoft owns Apple just because they had some shares a few decades ago.
Re:And Slashdot couldn't even link to it? (Score:4, Insightful)
This bias, built from MS's search seeing the world as highly MS-leaning from simply their own adherents using their products more, is somewhat self-defeating.
For popularity-driven ranks, the wider the audience and usage, the better the full audience will be able to make use of the statistics it employs. If MS's employees, contractors, proponents, vendors, etc are the primary users for the tool before a general web world, the stats will be be slanted towards MS's offerings, as you allude.
I would expect for a release as important as this to the MS portfolio, I would expect them to reset the statistics after the initial rollout, or even sub-sample the IP's, selecting for diversity, for the stats to fight bias. Without this, I can only wait until another set of "MS is just pushing more MS" posts across the blogosphere.
Then again, perhaps a healthy dose of bing-bombing (aka google-bombing) the site will re-skew it to those who fight such battles.
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Ok, but, if you search the "Linux Windows" suggestion, the very first result is a very long, well cited, and fair comparison of linux v windows...
http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.html [michaelhorowitz.com]
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It's also very funny that in the spanish version of bing, searching for some terms shows the Encarta search page for that term as the first real link (after the ads), and Wikipedia in second place.
That does not mean what you think it does (Score:3, Interesting)
Looks like most of these people have been looking for Linux and Windows comparisons instead trying to download Linux.
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http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=microsoft+bing [justfuckinggoogleit.com]
I'll be the first never to say... (Score:5, Funny)
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Bing, bong, binger, bang (Score:3, Insightful)
* The reponse from a Bing search: "Bong" (like 'Ping' and 'Pong')
* A person who searches on Bing: A binger (or is 'banger' a better word?)
* When referring to Bing search results in the past tense, it's a "Bang", like "Ring" and "Rang". Or maybe it's "Bung", like "Ring" and "Rung".
Hm... I didn't mean to make rude comments about Bing, but the name kind of lends itself to some bad nicknames.
The knights (Score:2)
that said Bing.
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I wonder how much $$ flows from MS to Google per click.
I guess I'll have to repeat
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just go Bing it!
Is that Chandler Bing or Bing Crosby?
Meh (Score:5, Informative)
Who needs Bing? Google works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bing's OK. But it's nothing special. Even if it's technically superior in certain ways to Google--I can't tell so I'll leave that for the intellectuals to tease out--there's no particular reason to switch.
I have NEVER had a problem finding stuff on Google. Usually what I'm looking for appears in the first 10 hits. About 10% of the time, I need to rephrase my search, or add some "-" keywords to weed out some signal noise. But Google does the job, I'm used to it, and it seems to just keep getting better.
There is so much power hidden inside Google's engine--stock quotes, mathematical calculations, language translation, mapping, document conversion, caches of deleted pages, paid links that I actually find useful, typo correction--the list goes on and on and on!
What can Microsoft's search engine add to this stunningly rich resource that millions of us can't live without? What killer features does Microsoft give us? Some little tweaks here and there in the UI that may or may not make much difference. Some good ideas on supplemental information such as the "related searches" column on the left.
Sorry, Microsoft, but Bing looks like MSN Search that's been tweaked a little. If Google didn't exist, you might have a winner on your hands, but this is just another "me, too" search system that will survive only as a niche product, funded by profits from the MS Office and Windows divisions.
Any market penetration by Bing will probably come from super-glueing it to the Windows 7 desktop and Windows mobile handhelds, defaulting it on IE searching, and otherwise forcing it down customers' throats in whatever way they can, hoping a large enough population will be ignorant enough to just use the defaults. But now that "google" is a verb in the dictionary, Microsoft has its work cut out for it to hold and expand its little piece of the search market.
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you wish it was google
take a look at this
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3604/3585051300_d23a37a32e_o.png [flickr.com]
To disable tracking (Score:5, Informative)
Add www.bing.com/fd/ls/* to your filters.
Re: (Score:2)
Or use NoScript. Searches just fine without JavaScript.
-dZ.
bing is for porn (Score:5, Informative)
Yah. Just find the stuff I want you to find (Score:3, Insightful)
Clicking or hovering over a video is inane crap. Do the hard stuff please, it involves some rather advanced mathematics and shit load of computers, not flash/javascript.
Google are btw getting worse at finding the stuff I need, so there's an opening there.
Yeah but.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe they think this is why everyone is using GNU now?
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The googles, they do nothing! (Link's not working.)
Google and Bing side by side.. (Score:5, Informative)
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Search for "Linux" results in Microsoft products? (Score:5, Interesting)
I noticed that also.
Here are the first four "Search suggestions" for when I type "linux":
linux
linux windows
linux microsoft
linux vista
Is this because Microsoft inserted itself into those search suggestions? Or is it because the majority of Bingers are using Microsoft products and thus the results are skewed ?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Call BS all you want, I just visited bing.com for the very first time, typed "linux" into the search field, and verified for myself that GP is correct.
The suggestions I got, in order, were:
* linux
* linux windows
* linux microsoft
* linux vista
* linux commands
* linux download
* linux software
* linux distros
It knows I'm coming from Canada, so if you're getting different results where you are, maybe geography plays a role?
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Hey, thanks.
I've always avoided Live search and its predecessors because they're fucking useless.
I was wondering if they'd made this new search engine less fucking useless. Obviously they haven't.
It's a shame they didn't learn anything with the Vista debacle -- it doesn't matter how much you spend on marketing if your product is shit. It's still shit, and unless you're selling to farmers who actually want to buy shit, you're not going to sell your shit to anyone.
Huge amount of text ads (Score:3, Insightful)
What first impress me is the huge amount of ads in the search results. Searching for "sql server [bing.com]" I can only see two real results before having to scroll the page and is hard to distinguish the ads on the top of the page, from the real results.
Looks like a parking site or a DNS redirect. (Score:5, Interesting)
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not one, but TWO search boxes (the second simply to search within microsoft.com) which will probably frustrate and confuse as many users as it might help.
Yeah, because Google would never have a Microsoft search box within search results:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=microsoft&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10&fp=2Inaafc1UxE [google.com]
Seriously, you can't fault them for duplicating the functionality of the well-established leader in search.
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There's only one placement at the top of the page, one placement at the bottom, and a single text ad in the right column.
Compare to the Google search of the same term: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=%22sql+server%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10&fp=2Inaafc1UxE [google.com]
Google has the one placement at the top of the page, virtually identical to Bing's. It has no placement at the bottom, given, but it has 8 placements in the right column.
So Bing's total placements: 3. Google's: 9.
First impressions (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, seriously... what's with that 80 KiB background JPEG on the homepage?
Image search is actually nice, though I would put the filters at the top instead of the left. The results leave a bit to be desired (tried "portable mame cabinet", hoping to find something I looked at a few days ago - no luck there). Also, scrolling down loads more pictures automatically. No need to go to "page 2" for more results. That's actually nice. The size/weight info on hover is a nice touch too.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I myself am connected on a 5Mbits cable modem. Not everyone has a high-speed connection, however, and that 80KB background serves no purpose on a search engine homepage.
If anything, that particular picture would fit a travel agency website or something, not a search engine homepage.
Also, it means a lot more bandwidth usage on the server side.
I've "bung" a few queries (Score:2)
And aside from the expanded snippet feature (which is pretty clever) I don't see anything new or exciting. WTF?
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its all about the data (Score:4, Insightful)
You want to know something funny? (Score:5, Interesting)
I realized just now that if some other company had started up and created a new search engine called "Bing" I would probably find it really charming. But when Microsoft does it, it just seems like The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. The human subconscious is a player-hater.
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Somebody needs to take on Google (Score:2, Insightful)
It may as well be Microsoft. Right now, Google has no real competition.
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You know what would help competing against Google?
A good search engine.
Maybe Microsoft can take all that money they spend rebranding their useless shitty search engine every 2 years and build a good search engine? I don't care what they're calling MSN Messenger this week, it's a great product and I keep using it despite the constant name changes. Similarly, I don't care what they call Live Search or Bing or MSN Search or whatever they want to call it this week, it's shit and it's going to remain shit until
Guess what microsoft did (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, Microsoft has acquired the domain bingsucks.com.
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yep, google does the same for their domains aswell, aswell as lots of other companies.
Not to worry (Score:5, Funny)
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I think that domain should be reserved for bing's rule 37 entry.
Did anonymous even try the video search? (Score:5, Informative)
So I don't understand the beef about "Would a user still click on to the site if they can watch the whole video from within the search results?" because the user clearly can't watch the whole video from the search results.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I also rather like the image results, I can't speak for the actual images themselves, but the way they're presented is so much nicer than Google with a convenient dynamic load as you continue scrolling down the page. Live search did this too.
Plus they find 1500 images for my site, five times as many as Google.
I really exist (Score:2)
I Binged (Bung?) and found myself, which indicates that Bing works well ;). I got approximately the same stuff as with Google.
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Life, The Universe, And Everything (Score:2, Funny)
Notice how Google gets it right [google.com].
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But it fails [bing.com] to answer this important question!
Notice how Google gets it right [google.com].
You just have to phrase it right [bing.com].
It seems it does other [bing.com] calculations [bing.com] too [bing.com].
Does anyone else... (Score:2)
...hear Stephen Tobolowsky as Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day exclaiming "BING!" every time they read the word?
Also, does anyone else ponder why Microsoft's product names are either really generic and boring, or totally cheesy and cringe-worthy?
~Philly
They copied google, proved they cant innovate (Score:2)
I just had a look. Man what utter dogshit. It has pretty much copied Googles thinking on minimalist, but even fucked that up with a picture background. Morons.
To my mind, it's just a bad copy. And the name, man, which tard thought that up.
I really hope MSN stays were it is, insignificant. Only because it would be nice to see MS NOT win due to $$$ for once.
Redundant results (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't merge results from a same website.
With apologies to Dennis Miller... (Score:4, Funny)
To learn more about Bing, type "bing search engine" into Google.
Bing is pretty pointless (Score:2)
I tried Bing for about ten seconds and saw no immediate reason to switch from Google.
Yawn.
I wanted to check out this thumbnail video thing.. (Score:2)
...and upon hovering over a video still, I get this:
Error #2044: Unhandled AsyncErrorEvent:. text=Error #2095: SmartPreviewNetStream was unable to invoke callback onMetaData. error=ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property onMetaData not found on SmartPreviewNetStream and there is no default value.
at SmartPreview()
at SmartPreview_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()
I guess nobody at MS tested their results with the debug version of Flash Player?
My prediction (Score:2)
The Sound of Annoyance (Score:5, Funny)
HIJACKED! (Score:4, Informative)
some users of IE6, including yours truely, have had their systems "Hijacked" by Bing. No matter what registry settings are switched, Bing has become the default search engine. We cannot "Customise" the search settings. I wonder how many others have this problem or if anyone has a solution.
Hopefully Slashdot will pick up on my story below (help me out, and comment on it)
http://slashdot.org/submission/1011681/Microsoft-Forcing-Bing-on-Users [slashdot.org]
Re:HIJACKED! (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like a feature to get you to stop using IE6 already, goddamn it!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's a mistake - that's all. If you read the Google thread you linked to, you'd see that it happens because auto.search.msn.com handles "address bar search" and uses the "prov" parameter to decide where to send it. The new engine doesn't handle the "prov" parameter, which no doubt they'll fix. They're not intentionally hijacking anything. In fact, they're not even hijacking anything!
Apropos "Bing"... (Score:2)
It's the Luxemburgish slang word for "jail". I kid you not, as I am Luxemburgish (genetically only half) myself.
Reminds me of the German school newspaper in my final school, that was called "Flapp" (pronounced "fluhpp")... which is Luxemburgish for "turd".
I'm eagerly awaiting Microsoft Flapp to come out too. ^^
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I'm sure I'll be using it periodically for years, just to make jokes about how I'm using the search engine that goes 'Bing'.
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I'm on a Mac, and I don't have Windows Media Player. For me, the previews are played using Adobe Flash Player 10.
Re:In a word, it sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Big surprise, the video refuses to load unless you have Windows Media Player.
Wrong. They're using Flash, like everybody doing video on the web.
Despite the fact that I view wmv's all over the net just fine with mplayer, yet somehow MS can't seem to make this work.
It's your computer at fault, not Microsoft.
MS needs to get a clue and realize that they can't expect to gain market share in new areas if they lame out all of their products to try and reinforce their OS monopoly.
They're using Flash, you gigantic ass. It doesn't even query for the Silverlight plug-in-- Bing is *all Flash*.
Do they honestly expect to pull market share from youtube while telling users to go away until they install windows?
No they don't. Which is why their video previews has the same requirement YouTube has: Flash installed.
How did your retarded posting get modded up? Christ.
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The Happy Lil' Elves Magic Forest Company is still a viable provider of onsite security and defense. Don' let their name fool you.
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