Why is Microsoft’s Live Search so bad at searching? It’s a question I often ask myself. Take today, for example, I wanted to check my blog for entries about the woodpeckers that visit our garden. You may have noticed that on my Live Spaces homepage, there’s a Live Search gadget that enables you to search my blog entries directly.
So I go ahead and type in "woodpecker" and click the "Search" button. Result? Zilch, nada, nothing, zero result. That’s odd, think I, because I know that I have a blog entry on the woodpeckers in the garden. So I go to Google’s blog search and do the same thing. Result? A hit on the correct page.
As I say, why is Microsoft’s Live Search so bad? It’s embarrassing.
Update: you may note that now the results are more or less correct. That’s because months have gone by and Live Search’s spider has finally got around to visiting the relevant web pages. Well, whoop-de-doo. It still doesn’t excuse the miserable performance of the service as a whole.
Update II: I’ve now removed the gadget entirely since it recently stopped working at all, and always returned zero hits. The reason is that bloody Microsoft went and changed the search query syntax of its search engine, so any code out there that uses the old syntax is now well and truly screwed.
Update III: …and has Microsoft removed the gadget from the Windows Live Gallery? Nope, of course not. It’s still there, and in a prominent position. People – don’t you care that you’re increasing the noise to signal ratio? Clearly not. There’s a lesson for us all here… humankind will be Easter Island writ large…
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