Monday 30 June 2008

Why do normal people not use Live Search

I think you can group searchers into various categories (Normal People, Techies and Researchers), I'm sure there are more categories but these will do for just now. 

Since I fit into the Techie category most of my searches will come under that banner (however I occasionally stray into the normal person category, for example sports searches). 

I think Live.Com does a good job at normal searches (probably better than Google).  For example searching for Spurs in Live gives me a broader set of results than Google.  In Google I get a large amount of results to do with Tottenham Hotspur (soccer team) but no results about San Antonio Spurs. 

I am British and I live in the UK so my results in Google are geared towards the UK and most people in the UK searching for Spurs would be interested in Tottenham Hotspur but since I support San Antonio Spurs (and have no interest in Tottenham Hotspur), the results from Google are no use to me. 

Live however gives me results from all camps (and gives me what I am really interested in Last Result, Division Standing etc). 

So if Live.com does a better job at normal results than Google then there is something else going on.  What it is I am not sure?  I suspect it is all to do with Marketing, Image, Brand, UX and all that kind of thing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Forgive us normal people for not checking every month to see if Microsoft's latest claim to have surpassed google has ceased to be laughably absurd.

chrishayuk said...

From that comment it seems there may be a brand / image problem

Anonymous said...

not too mention google over zealous attempts at GUESSING what you are really searching for instead of simply what you DID search for. ie results that don't contain a search word even with a + in front of them