Windows Live Search goes Live
Found on Slashdot on Tuesday, 07 March 2006
"Microsoft has launched the Windows Live Search. Among the reports, Microsoft Search Senior Product Manager, Justin Osmer says that "The beta, and a revision expected in a few months, will challenge market leader Google."" I like the more dynamic image searching tool. It seems really slow- I'm not sure if that's the dynamicness (is that a word?) or just standard launch lag.
It's not like I like to run MS down... but when I first tried to test it, I got a "Server busy" message only. Obviously Live got slashdotted pretty fast (the article was still on top). About 6 hours later, I gave it another try; it turns out you need Javascript and Cookies. But even with all that, it did not return any results, just the same site over and over (and all that was tested in IE5.5). Not to mention it's slow and sometimes just returned a blank page. Surprisingly, Live works in Firefox. I got quite a different layout than in IE and finally had the chance to test it. A quick search for "miserable failure" brings up rather different top hits; Live returns the homepage of Michael Moore, but Google lists Dubya's biography as number 1. Are those unaltered results? Only MS knows. To sum it up: I can challenge Google, you can challenge Google, MS can challenge Google; the success is the same.