Microsoft’s search a lot better than it used to be

I want Live’s “no pagination” feature back! That was the one feature that hooked me. No scrolling through search results was amazing. Now, they’re still not as good as Google, so I just don’t care about them.

The mobile Live Local is pretty cool. It shows location with phone numbers for businesses, that let a smartphone just call the number from the search results. That’s pretty cool.

No.

Microsoft is then what… 5, 10 years behind still?

Plus, Microsoft has a tendency to want to cram as much info in a page as possible, whereas, Google has a minimalistic approach.

For me to switch to ANY other search engine, it would have to offer something more, which it doesn’t.

Plus, Google is the defacto standard. Nobody cares about other search engines anymore.

Robert… live.com also recognizes the pattern when a piece of data is a tracking number (like google).

Try it… search for one of you own recent tracking numbers. I don’t remember this in search.msn.com does anyone?

Search for “vista rc2″ at both sites and see the sponsored links.

Robert, I’ve tried Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live.com .. and my view is that Google kicks the crap out of everyone else. In fact, MSN and Live.com are at the bottom of the pile. On the other hand, Google is constantly innovative in its approach.

For example, a search for Durham, NC automatically gives a link to Google Maps. Similarly, a search for “Chicago jobs” automatically throws up a search box for jobs by category in the Chicago area. Ain’t that cool ?

And then, there’s Google Scholar et. al …

MSN may have improved, but is still wayyyy behind Google …

Still not as good for most business and tech things, but now my top search tool as a collector and sometimes as a shopper.

Try something like “Georg Jensen” or even a more generic term such as vintage or antique silver. Google has improved the results on that so that it’s no longer a dozen pages of eBay that don’t even lead to the search item, but Live gives me what I know are many of the top sites and usually in descending order.

On the gazillion collector and shopper searches done regularly, eBay corrupted Google searches a lot.

Vera

“I’m so glad they ditched that scrolling thing they had before… It was terrible.

The problem here, is that MS’s business plan seems to still be “lets be as good as google.”

The main problem is, they’re not innovating. They’re simply letting other companies do the research and innovation and adopting best practices (eventually). That’s no way to catch up.”
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I think MS was the first to have algebraic searches, and related searches. And they have the scratchpad for image searches, soon to be made available for all searches (according to internet rumor). And they had the single-page infinite scroll (fine, they tested it and it didn’t work, but it was still innovative; it’s still used for their image search).

You’re just unaware of what MS is doing.
Google’s not done much innovating lately besides buyouts, and they’ve done NOTHING to improve their search; it’s the same as it was years ago, only with worse results as time goes on.

“Why? Like you stated in your post. Trust.”
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LOLOLOL
“Trust?” For a web search engine?? Why would I, or anyone need to “trust” a search engine? You try a search and see what the results are. Unless you’re referring to Google’s storing all of your searches so they can profile you so as to feed you pointless ads; maybe that’s what you “trust” Google to do. I don’t waste time “trusting” something as inconsequential as a search engine.

Bat: I disagree that Google hasn’t improved over the past few years. It’s gotten better in my searches that I track. Also, they’ve added tons of little features like movie reviews, weather data, stock charts, and other things. Also, Google Local blows away everyone else.

Bat: I definitely trust Google. I’ve done 10s of thousands of searches on it and it behaves consistently and quickly. That builds my trust of what it’ll bring back and do for me.

For me, it’s going to near impossible to switch more than 50% of my searches away from google. The reason is that my brain is just wired to type http://www.google.com when I want to search. Also, as a firefox user, I am used to using the search box, which defaults to google.

That said, recently, I have made about 1/3 of my searches on live.com. The reason is that the results are very good, but often significantly (and usefully) different than google.

I would say that live.com would be a huge success if they could reach 25% search share.

Google wins hands down for me. Why? I type in my full name and the first link is to my blog. What’s so great about that? The fact that my full name appears nowhere on my blog or my profile. Try it in Yahoo or MS Live and the best I come up with is a friend’s blog within the first 20 listings which has a link with my full name.

Now that’s what I call impressive. Of course, it might be related to the fact that I am on Blogger, but it is still impressive.

Just like techie duping YouTube ain’t gonna pull in any converts, so too will “making it better” not work. It’s about the experience and the community per se…Google has a lot of history, offerings and hooks to keep people coming back.

But on the flipside, Google has gotten all noised-up, blog and Wiki city, it’s half worthless for me. It’s not really a search engine, it’s an advertising engine. Lexis/Nexis and Westlaw, ok now that’s a search engine…

Live seems slower than a one-legged locust…and to quote that FBI guy from ‘Prison Break’, the problem with being on the trail, is that you will always be behind…it always feels “me too”.

Google can’t do applications and UI’s, Microsoft can (halfway), but should just stop trying to outdo Google, Apple and Sony, and focus on their core strengths. It really only provides for an endless source of amusement for the public and press, as you watch the geeks acting all faux cool, loaded up with a UMPC or Tablet, Microsoft Smartphone, Zune, 360 with HD-DVD add-on’s, doing Windows Live tricks with a straight face even — this while spending billions of shareholders money in never-ending futile pursuits, worshipping the Gods of Failure. Well, it also keeps Wilcox and Gartenberg gainfully employed…

Google is playing to not lose. Altavista used to be the best search and then paid results messed it up. It was easy for Google to enter the search market when that happened. If Google can maintain the purity of its results it can stay in the game.

The power of default options : IE7′s default search engine is ?

Hmm, I disagree that Google local is definitely miles better than local.live: Local.live produces miles better results for the part of the UK I live (East Anglia). Check it out! (I specially love the bird’s eye view over Cambridge).

However there’s certainly lots more intelligence and knowledge that needs to be developed, e.g., local live is abysmal on address searches, even for London!

“What is missing in the comparisons so far is that which is not the search. That is, I decided to launch the google page and live search, and perhaps it’s location, but the live search took ages. The fact that it did a redirect, and then the ‘front’ page has much more text and graphics to render, all that conspired to a very slow load time.”

What are you talking about? This page here?

http://search.live.com

That is a bare bones page. It has less text than Google’s, and while it has a couple of extra graphics, they are smaller than Google’s huge logo — I bet the number bytes works out to be similar. And sure, it does a redirect, but so does Google. I type ‘google.com’ and it redirects me to google.ca.

Google’s page does load faster, but the difference is very very minimal. I wouldn’t even ascribe it to the content of the pages. I think Google’s servers farm is just faster.

I have completely switched over to live.com for searching. In fact, next month will be 1 year since I stopped using google on a daily basis.

In IE7 I set my home page to Google and leave my search box (top right) at the default Windows Live.

Force of habit keeps me on Google but it’s good to have Live as a second opinion, plus I have the other plug-in search providers.

Microsoft’s search may be “a lot better than it used to be”, but it’s still not quite as good as Google Search, and *both* are still grossly sub-par compared to Apple’s Spotlight.

Robert, I don’t think that Google’s local stuff blows away Live’s at all. What are you talking about?
Can you give some examples? Or are you just regurgitating Silicon-Valley doctrine?

Bat: I just did a search for San Francisco Sushi. I like the speed a LOT better and the formatting is better on Google. But, yeah, you’re right, Live.com has largely caught up there as well. Thanks for challenging me on that.

It is a lot better, and my default engine because I use Vista, but it still sucks because the CACHING sucks. It doesn’t highlight anything, the cache fails half the time, and there’s no text-only option.

Also, as mentioned in the mini-msft blog foriegn language results seems iffy.

I already made the change because it’s what’s used in ie7 by default and I like it better.