After working for Yahoo you start to look at search engines in a different way…
You probably noticed microsoft’s new Live search with some nice new concepts on web search interface, but nothing really revolutionary.
I’m not the best person to talk about any MS products so please check also what slashdot is talking about it http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/08/1433235.shtml
Anyway, I have some impressions myself:
Search features:
- Couldn’t find image search, what’s something really important for search engines these days.
- News search is poor, worst than yahoo (images) and google (images and categories).
- the Live.com idea of adding searches and feeds to “my live” is very old and much more flexible on google (ig) and yahoo (my).
- No image, video, shopping, business, local, maps, nothing…
Quality:
- Web results are fine but still worse than google and yahoo
- scientific results are crap (perceptron, alpha helix, drosophila melanogaster, dna sequencing, etc)
- technical results are crap (acpi linux, sql server, windows, DBI, STL, rsync, etc)
Layout:
- Nice to have all-in-one page and also nice to use home/pgup/pgdn buttons and mouse scroll on the result page, but also it’s bad because it’s not searchable.
- The sponsored matches tool is funny, it changes when you scroll down the page
- The verbose level gauge is cool
- Add to live.com doesn’t work, you have to click on the plus signal
- A reload on any page will lead you to the home page, that erally sucks.
- Ajax is cool, but would not make the tool cool just by itself! It needs more content!
In a nutshell, it’s just like all stuff microsoft does: it’s a beautiful way of doing not so well the same thing others are already doing very well. And, of course, a big marketing budget to make people believe it really is a new revolutionary thing.
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