I appreciate your taking the time to post on Beyond Search. Yep, the GOOG is an interesting company. I am probing the key decisions made in 1998 and 1999 by Microsoft and Google. Google went one way. Microsoft went another. The difference today reaches back to DEC engineers. Google used the DEC input one way. Microsoft used the DEC input another. What a difference listening and problem solving approaches make.

Stephen Arnold, July 9, 2008

Google is a huge sign post of a paradigm shift that from an economic point of view will reshape every industry and human interactions globally. In scientific term I would characterize Google has a “phase transition” in knowledge and information with it’s use of algorithms to impose order where as before there was disorder of information. Every Institution of every type will either crumble or change based on the Google effect of information and knowledge empowering the individual above the institution.

Just my take.

However, I found this sentence in particular

“Microsoft owns a site called Live.com that offers search results that in many cases are just as good as Google’s, and sometimes are better.”

unfortunate to say the least. Which cases David? This is the web. Couldn’t you provide links it to some of your cases? What do you mean by good? When and who says it’s better or worse than? Is it just your personal opinion from a user point of view?

To measure search engine performance so different solutions can be compared, it’s more of an academic/scientific task, than a matter of personal opinion. Actually it’s a quite huge and difficult task, maybe as difficult as the search problem itself.

I’m not an expert on search. I will give you an example on how different google and all other search engines are from my very recent personal experience then.

About a month ago we launched the free web service privnote.com and I needed to track how the community was reacting to it.

For that purpose I tried google.com, Live.com, yahoo.com, and other search engines. I found this fresh and very dynamic reality of privnote evolution in cyberspace only represented at google. Other search engines were not of service to my task at hand.

I do not have any search engine preference, and I tried most of them for what I needed. I’m not trying to prove here that google is better than others in general. I’m aware this is just a particular example. Nevertheless it does show that google is technologically on another league, at least for the task I needed to sort out.

See:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=privnote&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=w

That gives me at the moment of this posting 409 blogs related to privnote generated during the last week only.

Can anyone get anything to compete with this result with other search engines? I could not. However if someone knows it better I’ll be very happy to be helped out.

David, just do the following. Search for “Why Microsoft will win Yahoo” at google.com and at live.com, and you tell me what you think now.

See this:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Why+Microsoft+will+win+Yahoo%22&sa=N&start=0

and then try to come up with something close to that with other search engines can provide you.

I wouldn’t like to have the job of integrating all these different technologies into one unified whole! Better to take all the clever guys who wrote them and give them enough freedom and money to develop something revolutionary and new.