Windows Live gains market share, Google loses
The question is why?
From John Battelle, Windows Live gains search marketshare in March, while Google loses a bit.
So I stopped on over to the Live site to execute a search whose results I need for a day trip. I wanted a map of 10th and Fulton in San Francisco. So I go to the FireFox toolbar and type “fulton and 10th avenue, sf”.
The Google results include a second click Google Maps result, which is exactly what I wanted. The Live second click was a link to the SF Chronicle that, as it turns out, did contain a map of the 10th and Fulton area. But I’m not going to follow that link, because a SF Chronicle link could contain virtually anything. Not only that, when I clicked on “Maps” in Live, the search string had not been sufficiently disambiguated for Live to present me with the map I wanted, namely the intersection of 10th Avenue and Fulton in San Francisco, CA. It wanted me to narrow the input, starting with a map of the continental United States. None of the suggested locations matched a location in San Francisco. What?
If Live wants to be taken seriously by a world trained to use Google, it needs to adapt to us, not the other way around. Of course, I’m logged into GMail almost continously for a couple years now, so Google probably knows what links I want based on my history. But until Live can get up to speed and surmount that history-less barrier it has with me, I find it unusable. The results returned are inferior to Google’s, not that Google’s are by any measure always spot-on. But at least I know how Google thinks, and vice versa, so I know how to manipulate it for effect. Besides, with the full faith and credit of Microsoft Research behind it, how many different things is “10th and fulton, sf” likely to mean? Live is linking to literal content rather than meaning behind the search input.
If Live eventually offers a consistently higher quality search experience than Google, I’d probably switch. Every six months or so, I go have a look at Live with some typical search input. And every time I come away with the same conclusion: they’re just nowhere close. And a question: who are these users who are getting value out of Live?
