After weeks of speculation Microsoft released it's new search tool tonight. I haven't seen anything this unimpressive for a long time. If as the old saying goes Windows '95 = Macintosh '84 then apparently Microsoft Search '04 = Google '00. One of the same big problems remains, if you want to get indexed the only option they list is a commercial venture that explains how to get businesses listed. I currently have a portfolio of some very active sites and lots of great content and only about 10% are commercial. I also don't quite get the distinction that allows one to search for a particular type of page (Word, Excel, Power Point, PDF, or HTML) and then the very next option is a search by file type (that oddly includes PDF but only shows .doc as an example). This does nothing to replace MetaCrawler of old (not the current version) as one of the best search sites ever.
by Joshua Brauer on November 10, 2004
1 Comment
For what it's worth, it took
For what it's worth, it took me about a year or so to really get MetaCrawler good from when I released it back in '95... back then, I had no problem making a code change at 7 PM PST, going home, only to truck in at 9 AM the next day to lots of mail from cranky people in Australia who let me know in some very colorful lingo that I had horribly broken it. ;)
I'm now on the MSN Search team, and we're working on it. Yeah, we know where we are, and we have a bunch of issues still. But we have a lot of smart people on the team, and we are dedicated to not only making an awesome product, but also changing some of the culture around here to make _the_ killer product that *is* the best from customers who have a choice.
-e