So I read today that Live.com upgraded it's Live Search. I live and die by the search engine when researching information so I'm always up for testing out the "other guy" on the block.
I honestly want to like Live Search. I do like the aesthetic of the search results better than Google's. That hardly matters when the search results are so often irrelevant.
I have two relevant experiences here that I wanted to discuss. First, on my Vista PC at work I gave up on Firefox and went back to Internet Explorer. I love Firefox, but for some reason it is just not fast enough. At any rate, in going back to IE, the default search was Live.com so I said, what the heck.
In my few days of using it, I found a couple of things - but there were more times than not when the results just didn't click for me and I had to new tab to Google. Google just wins. It's as though Google can read my mind and gives 80% different results on nearly every search. (on the front page - do you ever go deeper, except on complex searches?)
So I gave up on Live.com search a few months ago. Then, seeing that it upgraded last night I decided I'd give it one more try.
In a related article I saw that Performance Point Server 2007 had been released. I read a quick article on a new site about it and decided I'd do a quick search and see what I could find. I fired off to live.com search.
I ran two searches:
msdn performance point server
and
performance point server
The first was targeted to get me into some development related content over on the MSDN site. The second was to get me general product info and links hopefully to the main Microsoft sites to get me more info.
I was amazed at the disparity. Live.com really biases blogs and elevates their rankings. You know, that's fine - to get blogs into the picture because they are typically more timely - but rarely are they extremely heavy on content. I find blogs on Google but boy are they good at filtering out the non-content focused blog entries. And besides, if I really want blog links, I'd go to technorati or techmeme anyway.
Google's results for the second search are exactly what I was looking for, whereas the live.com one can't seem to figure out what I'm talking about. I don't care what bloggers have to say - when I search for an EXACT PRODUCT NAME, I'd hope to find factual focused sites on the specified topic.
One thing I may be asking for here is that maybe blog searches need to be filtered out better - on both sites. I read on Lifehacker a while back about doing a date-oriented search on Google which is really cool. But, I'd like that to be an elevated feature. Almost like a toggle on the homepage for "include blogs" and "sort by date [newest first]"
Back to the issue at hand - Live.com, despite the major upgrade, is still not getting me to the relevant content out there. Sure, it's one search. But if they don't win me to their search with one search - how are they ever going to win against Google.