- Posted by sondreb on May 14, 2008
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When I attended the MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle in April, Steve Ballmer asked all the attendees to try using Live Search as their default search engine for one week. I have since then, been using Live Search as my default engine in Internet Explorer.
Initially it's been very hard getting used to the Live Search and all to often I tend to type Google.com in the address bar and search using their index instead. There is no denying that the Google search index is better than any other, they win flat down on their results quality. But searching is more than just results (obviously, it's the single most important feature of a search engine, but that's one of the things that is constantly improving on the back-end).
One of the reasons Google have had great success is the good performance on their site. It's not bloated with nice graphics and JavaScript. Which is one of the failure Microsoft did with their first versions of Live Search. They tried to do way too much, when all that people wanted was quick results and not a fancy UI where you could navigate the results.
But these days the game is changing.
Without being marked as self-obsessed, I sometimes search on my own name; just to see if there are any articles, blog posts or related information connected to my name. Here is a screen shot from the results I receive from both Google and Live Search.
As you can see, they are somewhat similar and there is no advertisements on either.
On this second search, I made a search for my FDBoy drifting car project, which is one of my hobbies.
As I search for a more general and widely used word, you'll quickly realize that Google has started to become somewhat bloated with advertisements. What used to be a very clean search results, is now packed with various ads for products and corporations. When I searched for "FDBoy", I received results that asked me if I want to buy a subwoofer and regarding design for my apartment?
By default, Live Search returns more results than Google (you can choose in options how many results you want per page, but I'm happy with more default than Google uses with today's powerful computer and broadband connections).
If we take another quick look at search results, it's an area where Microsoft needs to do some work. If I do a quick search on Capgemini, the company I work for, I get very good results on Google but on Live Search the first result doesn't even contain the word "Capgemini". Very poor!
Translation of web sites is one area where Google is excellent, if you see in the first screen shot from Google, it allows me to do a translation of my own web site into Norwegian, and the translation is very good and useable. Hopefully Microsoft will put some research and development efforts into this area of "search" technology. I won't cover any more features of Google or Live Search, it's the search capability that is important and without a good search, the extra bonus features is useless fun.
I will continue to use Live Search as my default search engine, but I'm still falling back to Google whenever Live Search fails on me, which it does from time to time. Please feel free to leave your own comments regarding Google and Live Search and perhaps you'll try out Live Search as your default for a while?
http://www.live.com/