Microsoft's New Search Engine Exits Beta Status
Posted by Emil Protalinski on 12 September 2006 - 11:26 · 18 comments & 5030 views
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Emil ProtalinskiContact: via forum PM
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#1 Posted by SeMz... on 12 Sep 2006 - 11:43
- its very good but im so used to google now, ive been using it for well over 5 years so it will be hard to just switch to live search.. unless there is somethign that google cannot provide and that i need
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(1 reply)
#2 Posted by RangerLG on 12 Sep 2006 - 12:02
- I don't see what more a search engine can do than what is already being done.
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#3 Posted by AnarKhy on 12 Sep 2006 - 13:17
- And its not only google search, but gmail, google earth, google spreadsheets, picasa... all very nice and clean environment
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#4 Posted by antaris on 12 Sep 2006 - 13:24
- What I am hoping is that they will decrease the screen real-estate given to sponsored links, sometimes I have found that you need to scroll the entire viewport before getting to your results. Anyone else found that?
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#5 Posted by shirike on 12 Sep 2006 - 13:34
- I don't know about anyone else but GDS plugins all seem horrendously out of date and the most useful ones tend to require you use their interface which tends to ruin the experience.
WDS isn't much better but it feels more integrated that GDS and uses less resources. However, configuring it is a hassle, you need to run Terminal Services services, and is an absolute nightmare to uninstall.
However, I settled on Copernic Desktop Search because, as a package, it covers more file types, configures more easily on a single desktop, and feels very compact and tidy. -
#5.1 Posted by Brandon Live on 12 Sep 2006 - 17:51
- Huh? First off, this has nothing to do with desktop search.
Second of all, WDS does not require you to run Terminal Services.
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#6 Posted by Jugalator on 12 Sep 2006 - 13:40
- Google has some noise in its search results lately, such as from obvious link farms. But on the other hand, I don't see Live Search as clearly a better choice either, and it has some accuracy problems on its own that Google doesn't share. I think it's pretty similar to Google, maybe a little bit less mature in its search index, but even if it was just as good, that would be way too little to compete with Google. At this point, something needs to be vastly better, not "as good".
Perhaps some form of auto-categorization could be useful, where the searcher can check/uncheck boxes of content to include. Categories could be things like "Blog", "Product/Marketing", "Store", ... The tough part would be to put the sites it index into the proper categories via a search algorithm though.
Another interesting concept could be search result tagging, so if a site gets enough tags of the same kind from different users, it starts appearing as a tag for that site in the search results, and a user can then filter on tags. Then searching for "George W Bush" and typing "politics" in a tag box would only search for GWB on politics-related sites and not include e.g. humor sites. This would be an elegant solution with user-defined tags, but it could end up as a victim of malicious tagging in a DDoS-attack form.
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#7 Posted by Robin.B on 12 Sep 2006 - 15:17
- I've been trying to use Live Search a bit. It's considerably slower than Google is, and the results are actually worse. Google is clean, fast, and I'm just used to typing "www.google.com" in my browser.
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#7.1 Posted by Brandon Live on 12 Sep 2006 - 17:52
- Have you used it recently? It's definitely not slower anymore (since they dropped the AJAX stuff).
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#8 Posted by HawkMan on 12 Sep 2006 - 15:22
- Funny how when I searched for "Java beta download" in google, the download for the Java 1.6 beta or even the java beta center thign was nowhere to be found.
guess what was the first link I got on Live :p
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#9 Posted by SniperX on 12 Sep 2006 - 15:40
- I believe that Google does need some healthy competition, as for many businesses online, it can sometimes mean the difference between many sales or no sales at all, if you can't be found in Google.
However, for me personally, Microsoft is the very last company name that springs to my mind when thinking of searching. I just don't see how they're ever going to topple that now hugely recognised Google brand name for search. -
#9.1 Posted by lbmouse on 12 Sep 2006 - 18:07
- Quote -I just don't see how they're ever going to topple that now hugely recognised Google brand name for search.
The same way they popularized the little known IE brand, they embedded into one of their monopolistic products (Win95). Now they will just embed the MSN search into another one of their monopolistic products (IE 7.0).
God help the consumer. Without competition, there is little or no innovation. Without innovation the consumers get stuck with an outdated/non-standards compliant browser and 5 years of waiting for a stripped-down version of a new OS with 'features' like embedded DRM & WGA. -
#9.2 Posted by Kirkburn on 12 Sep 2006 - 23:09
- Quote - lbmouse said @ #9.1Quote -I just don't see how they're ever going to topple that now hugely recognised Google brand name for search.
The same way they popularized the little known IE brand, they embedded into one of their monopolistic products (Win95). Now they will just embed the MSN search into another one of their monopolistic products (IE 7.0).
God help the consumer. Without competition, there is little or no innovation. Without innovation the consumers get stuck with an outdated/non-standards compliant browser and 5 years of waiting for a stripped-down version of a new OS with 'features' like embedded DRM & WGA.
Wow, that was pretty uninformed. No, MSN search is NOT embedded into IE7, and it takes about 2 seconds to switch the top-right search box (if it isn't already set so) to search Google or a whole range of other options. It only defaults to Live Search if it wasn't set to anything else beforehand (which, frankly, makes sense). -
#9.3 Posted by lbmouse on 13 Sep 2006 - 13:01
- I picked the wrong wording but you get the gist. You say tomato, I say tomato; you say defaults, I say embedded. To the average consumer there is no difference. Sure, people interested in technology are going to modify their systems to use the proper operating systems, browsers, and search engines for their needs, but most users are going to use what comes straight out of the box with no questions asked. These users don't understand that DRM is embedded in Vista and other MS products.
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#10 Posted by Dessimat0r on 13 Sep 2006 - 02:04
- I'm surprised this works in anything other than Internet Explorer, given Microsoft's track record.
WLS will be available at MSN.com (by Thursday) and at search.live.com which redirects to live.com, microsoft’s personalized homepage initiative. According to comScore Networks, Microsoft dropped 3% from June 2005, leaving the market leaders at (June 2006):