Microsoft Get Medical Care

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/12313

Here are my problems with Microsoft Search.

1) It's loaded up with junk in the trunk like Yahoo's search -- Yahoo is the worst offender still.. with their flash ads that fill up the screen and make you look for the 1x1 pixel 'close x' somethere random on the ad.

This means that it's all about Brittney Spears.. and not about B2B and Business searches.

2) It's results are similar to Yahoo's... 7 years ago.

The results pages are dismal to say the least.. meaning that it drops authority sites right and left.. and lists blog spam as the authority.

3) They understand search as much as Dave Pasternack understands SEO. The old rule of just incorperating it into their OS doesn't work like it used do, mostly because the rules changed... everything went online rather than desktop software.

TF,

To a degree, I do agree. But here comes my caveat......

..... default search and default options within the OS means traffic. Brand new, fresh chances at winning to the MSN (dohhh, live) search experience.

If the search experience is good enough (it doesn't have to be great or even the best, good enough is.... GOOD ENOUGH) then there is no reason for the searcher to look in the manuals trying to work out how to change the default search.

So, as we all agree live / msn search is no where near good enough at the moment, and (IMO) the Medstory product does a pretty good job at providing relevant and accurate(ish) results within their marketplace, can it and will it be adapted to be a general purpose search engine rather than the vertical engine it is atm. ?

D,

I don't think that MSN / Live are honestly looking to compete with G in quality. They are looking to compete in advertising clicks.

Agreed...money of course is the reason everyone is in business... but think about it..

How do you increase traffic to increase advertising clicks? You build a better search engine. The only way for them to make money in this space is to build a better search engine.

nah - that's not gonna do it. Live could be the best most relevant comprehensive search engine on the planet and it still wouldn't be #1 nor even #2 for that matter. The unwashed masses don't have a clue about any of this stuff. They use who they use cuz it's their homepage or someone told them too.

If you want to take over and make any headway in the search world you're going to have to come up with a way of searching that is fundamentally different than what we have now. A clean home page with text box isn't any different than the other guy regardless of what sort of data it's accessing.

Live is going to have an interesting reach at some point and you're going to be able to push your ads into xbox live and all the msn properties and so forth.

As long as we live in a 'type in your query and press enter' world the landscape isn't going to change much from what we have now. Google will be the leader and the rest will fight over the scraps.

I talk to plenty of people whose ISPs set up a "start" page -- when they open their browsers, they go to the ISP home page, which has the ISPs default search (or whatever the ISP is using).

Unfortunately, they don't know anything about typing into the address bar; they think they have to search for something first in order to click on a link.

Go to Earthlink.net and click on the "My Earthlink" link at the top. That takes you here:
http://my.earthlink.net/

This looks like it's a default start page, with a Google search box. A friend who's used Earthlink for years says she set up her "own" start page, with links of her choice.

Probably most of us don't do this kind of thing, but it's important to know that others do.

True Diane but that's not search. That's a hijack of a user intent on visiting a site. User opens page, types in URL and clicks "GO" expecting to go there. Just because Yahoo/MSN/Earthlink/Whomever hijacked the trip doesn't mean they got SEARCH traffic.

I've had IE7 for quite a while, and every time DNS chokes or I enter a URL typo I get a Yahoo! search result. I have never clicked through, and I have been cognitively annoyed by the Yahoo! brand each and every time. Yes it was a user preference to put Yahoo! in there. I wanted to see if it was helpful. It's not.

Like Todd says... as long as search means going to a website to search, Google's a monopoly.

I've just been surprised at how often people -- regular people, not techies -- use these kinds of "features". Bear in mind that they mostly don't know about the address bar, so their start page *is* where they feel they have to start.

Yes, they're still using search, but not the way you or I may use it.