Microsoft Live.com (Dead) Is A Time Waster

Microsoft yesterday announced additions to its search engine and the company believes that they have done it. It was seriously over hyped.

The company introduced new features such as;
- auto-spell correction, with the option of leaving words misspelled
- mouse over capability on links and images
- better word handling (sometimes you need the "the" when searching: Office or The Office), they felt this was critical

Just as they said the new improved search was more relevant things started going wrong. After entering the word “dog” into Live Search, the number three result shows a paragraph from Wikipedia’s entry concerning digital on-screen graphics. The fourth result is also from Wikipedia, and relates to the dog’s place as a zodiac animal. Google’s top ten results all connect to dogs in the sense of dachshunds, collies, and golden retrievers, which is what everybody had in mind.

Microsoft also spoke of significant enhancements to core algorithms and expansion of Rich Answers and substantial improvements in understanding queryintent. What does that mean? In other words they are trying to do Universal Search like Google. Too much time was spend by management inventing new search terms to convince the crowd that they understood search.

Doug Caverly was unimpressed. Danny Sullivan said the improvements were incremental. I am sticking with Google.