Tim Barcz

Jay Kimble has got It Wrong

Jay Kimble posted recently about why live.com search sucks. In the post Jay talks about his troubles find the download page for a particular Microsoft product using Microsoft's live.com search engine, ultimately resorting to using Google to get his answer after live.com failed.  I generally enjoyed and agreed with the post, however I lost Jay on his final comment:

I'm not one to bite the hand that (sort of) feeds me, but come on!!??  The best search engine for MS' properties should be an MS Search Engine!!

In principal I agree, but I wholeheartedly disagree that the MS engine should be best for MS properties simply because they are MS properties.  The Microsoft engine should be the best at finding MS Properties because it's the best engine.  PERIOD.  As Jay pointed out this simply wasn't the case.

Google is dominant because of the quality of the result the engine provides.  If Microsoft operated as Jay suggests, my search for "Blue Shoes" could possibly return "Indigo" results at the top or a search for "Whales" returning a link to the latest download of Orcas, clearly not what I want in either case.  If live.com is to be the best resource for searching for MS properties it should solely be because of the quality of the backing algorithm and not some artificial elevation because it's MS owned as Jay suggests.