Microsoft's Search Falls Far Short Of Google's

MythicaL · Nov 14, 2004, 04:50 AM

Google engineers must have breathed a sigh of relief Thursday when rival Microsoft Corp. rolled out a new search engine that proved glitchy and failed to wow reviewers.

The mighty software maker quickly solved the technical problems that briefly served up "temporarily unavailable" messages instead of search results. It's unclear, however, how the company will address the missing "wow" factor.

Our tests of the new MSN Search's trial version (beta.search.msn.com) suggest that it's not as accurate as Google. While both sites do fine on many queries, our comparison of roughly two dozen search phrases gave the edge to Google at least two out of three times.

In response to a search on "history of photography," for example, Google yielded as its top result a site deep with resources about photographic history. MSN's top find was the personal site of a "natural history photographer." A more specific query, "death toll at Gettysburg," brought up the total body count of that Civil War battle in the second result on Google, an excerpt of a Forbes article, while none of MSN's top results spotlighted this figure. Typing in "wife of John Adams" at Google brought up Abigail Adams's official biography on the White House Web site as the first result; MSN showed her husband's official biography from the same site as its No. 1 find.

More: WashingtonPost

Nov 14, 2004, 04:50 AM	#1
MythicaL I like computers. Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: In front of a monitor Posts: 3,399 Rep Power: 89 System Specs	Microsoft's Search Falls Far Short Of Google's Google engineers must have breathed a sigh of relief Thursday when rival Microsoft Corp. rolled out a new search engine that proved glitchy and failed to wow reviewers. The mighty software maker quickly solved the technical problems that briefly served up "temporarily unavailable" messages instead of search results. It's unclear, however, how the company will address the missing "wow" factor. Our tests of the new MSN Search's trial version (beta.search.msn.com) suggest that it's not as accurate as Google. While both sites do fine on many queries, our comparison of roughly two dozen search phrases gave the edge to Google at least two out of three times. In response to a search on "history of photography," for example, Google yielded as its top result a site deep with resources about photographic history. MSN's top find was the personal site of a "natural history photographer." A more specific query, "death toll at Gettysburg," brought up the total body count of that Civil War battle in the second result on Google, an excerpt of a Forbes article, while none of MSN's top results spotlighted this figure. Typing in "wife of John Adams" at Google brought up Abigail Adams's official biography on the White House Web site as the first result; MSN showed her husband's official biography from the same site as its No. 1 find. More: WashingtonPost __________________ Always knew I didn't belong in this world. I wasn't made for this. But I'll never forget those who betrayed me, and those who never failed my trust.