Robert writes about how Windows Live search has gotten a lot better. He then wonders if it'll do them any good.
Now, the problem is, if Microsoft matches Google, who will switch away from Google? I won’t. The trust I’ve built since the late 1990s of searching Google many times a day without a problem is going to be a very hard thing to beat. To get me to switch Microsoft will have to be better than Google.
How about you? Does Microsoft (or Yahoo or Ask) have any hope of getting you to switch your default search engine?
I have to agree with him. Any time I use a search that's not Google, I'm left with the lingering thought, "Is there something missing here that Google would find?" I trust Google's search results completely. I'm not quite there yet with any other service. And I don't think I ever will be. First of all, I'm probably not going to search my default search engine, but if I did, I'd most likely go through a trust-earning period where I'd double-check all my searches in Google. It would probably be way too much overhead to be worthwhile. I'm right back to Google.
Heck, when I directed one of my Yahoo-favoring friends to do a web search, I told him to "just use Google" without even waiting to see if what we were looking for was in the page results.
Something as simple as the name has a profound effect on search engine choice. "Just google it" sounds right. "Just live.com it", "just yahoo it", or "just ask.com it" sound awkward.
So will just being better than Google get me to switch? Probably not, since I'll have no way of knowing.
Technorati Tags: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Live.com, Ask.com, search, web search
I'm pretty close to unsubscribing from the Apple Slashdot RSS feed. In the age of Digg, del.icio.us, Newsvine, etc, having a service model where an editor picks what to post just seems so antiquated. This is a perfect example of the pre-filtering vs post-filtering that Chris Anderson talks about in The Long Tail. For what it's worth, the Apple Slashdot site has had only 8 posts in the past seven days and pretty much all of them brought news that I saw hours or even days before they showed up in my Slashdot feed.
The most recent example is Phill Ryu's fake Leopard screenshot contest results, which were announced Wednesday 7/26 at 1:44PM. While I did see it straight from his blog no more than 30 minutes after it was posted, had I not been subscribed to his feed, Digg picked it up less than 90 minutes after so I would have seen it then. If I happened to miss either of those two sources (highly doubtful, considering one is the primary source) a link to the blog post appeared on many, many other Apple-related blogs. When did it show up on Slashdot? Tonight, Thursday 7/27 at 10:54 PM. It's "only" a day in real world time, but in blogosphere time that's an eternity!
And what about the tens or even hundreds (on a good week) of Apple stories that showed up in the past week? There's no mention of them anywhere on Slashdot. They bill themselves as "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." but there's a lot more that matters in a week than 8 stories. But I suppose that tag line became as irrelevant as Slashdot itself did a long time ago.
Technorati Tags: Slashdot, Digg, blogs, news, editors, Long Tail, del.icio.us, speed, relevance, editors, social media, traditional media, Web 2.0, community
TechCrunch reports that Yahoo is testing a new home page. It won't do them any good. It's still too cluttered. Even MSN Search (and Ask.com, too) got that one right. Not only that, but the old site compartmentalized content a lot better than this new one.
Seth Godin said it best at his talk at Google. The techies send non-techies to Google because they'll know what to do and won't come back to bother you.
If Yahoo is going after Google, they should stick with an uncluttered site for everyone and let My Yahoo! users make their personalized pages as cluttered as they want. If they're not going after Google anymore, well, then they should probably let the world know.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask.com, search, redesign, design, marketing, portal
I noticed a bunch of referrer links coming in from several Personal Megite pages, no doubt due to my comment on Scoble's latest Origami post.
While I do appreciate the page hits, and I probably shouldn't complain, I have yet to post the word "origami" anywhere on this site and so that means Megite is broken. From what I can tell from Megite's confusing font-size-based hierarchical layout, only about half the links under "Related Items" are actually about Origami and the rest are simply links to the blogs people "claimed" on Robert's post's comments. There's even a link to Myspace in there. It seems even Rupert Murdoch is trying to figure out what lies and what doesn't lie in Origami's path of death and destruction.
Of course if that didn't get me on Megite for Origami, ranting about a link on Megite relating to Origami sure will.
Technorati Tags: Megite, memetracker, meme, Origami, Microsoft, Robert Scoble, blogging, conversation, comments, hype
Scoble is testing out blog search engines (particularly the speed in which the update, I suppose) and he wants bloggers to include the word "brrreeeport" in their posts to "mess with the man."
I've always had pretty good luck getting my posts to show up on Technorati, but either not many people are blogging the word or its taking Technorati a particularly long time to index posts. I wonder how long it's going to take this post's trackback to show up on his blog? I have a feeling that it'll be sooner than Technorati…
Technorati Tags: Robert Scoble, blogging, blogs, Technorati, indexing, search, blog search, IceRocket, Feedster, brrreeeport
Make this holiday season the most memorable ever by getting a great deal on fascists on eBay!
Merlin Mann of 43Folders has a really funny photoset of AdSense ads he collected from eBay. It seems that eBay's ads are tied to the actual search terms and so doing a Google Search for strange terms returns hilarious computer-generated ads.
Check out the photoset to see them all.
(via kottke.org)
Technorati Tags: 43Folders, Flickr, eBay, Google, AdSense, funny, search, marketing
