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>but if you look at the search results from live and
>google, both have their strengths.

Yes...I really like being asked "I see your searching for information on Indiana Jones, would you like 10 pages of information about Indian Bones?"

Live results suck ass.

Even people working on Live Search admit that the search results of Google are much better. And it's very hard for them, if possible, to catch up.

What MS tries instead is to compete with unique features. For example the user interface, extra stuff like celebrity rating or bird's eye in the maps part -- which is awesome.

That's just the reality in the market today. And it's also plausible, Google is damn good at this and even as everybody else now also uses the PageRank algorithm, Google is years ahead on this topic.

Really? Have a link?

Silly me. I had the audacity to ask for a reference for the preceding assertion -- that Live Search folks think that Google is better -- and got modded down because of it. Whoever did it has the emotional maturity of a two-year old.

I forget when Yahoo! started doing search instead of just human-edited indexing, but didn't AltaVista have the head-start for web searches? Google had the better technology.

@shyouko: Luckily you can still conveniently use Google in IE7, just open the drop-down search combo and select "Find More Providers". If you click on Google you can even select it as a default search engine in one step.

Edited 2008-05-22 20:38 UTC

Unluckily IE settings in the Lab are not saved and the Lab tech refuses to make everyone's favourite the default.

Good that we have Portable Firefox. But since it is not the default browser, when you want to open a link on your desktop or from the news reader...

Search is quite different from, say, the OS market, or the accounting software market. Switching search engines is trivial, even for relatively inexperienced users. If Google were simply the only player which could afford to put together an infrastructure up to the task that would be one thing. But Microsoft has more money to spend than Google, and an infrastructure in place. Yahoo has an infrastructure in place. Other smaller players do too. And it's not like Microsoft's name is not even better known than Google's. And it's not like Microsoft does not use Windows/IE to try to steer people to its search engine. So I just don't see any artificial market forces of any note in Google's favor. Google beat Microsoft and Yahoo on search quality and so people use Google. So badly, in fact, that it appears Microsoft is having to pay customers to use their gratis service since they apparently couldn't give it away.

The "car dealer" example that you give regards a pay for product, and not a free service that user's seem not to want even for free.

Edit: I should probably be more clear on that point that while I see nothing *wrong* with providing cash incentives, I do find it *amusing* that the Microsoft giant, with all those mind boggling resources, has had to resort to this. :-0

Edited 2008-05-22 23:13 UTC

Google has ties with Apple, Firefox etc. to make sure their search engine is the default.

IE7 actually offers you an option if you want to change the default live.com the first time you start it. Neither Safari nor Firefox offer that option on install.

Edited 2008-05-23 01:14 UTC

Perhaps you haven't noticed... but Firefox and Safari are not exactly dominating the browser market, even by the most optimistic estimates.

Regarding the Paypal comparison in your other post, I am not familiar with the cash back policy to which you refer. But I would say that although it's not quite so trivial to change one's payment processor as one's search engine, that is another market where free competition appears to be operating pretty well. The reviews I have seen of Google Checkout have been rather luke warm. (Then again, I'm not sure I've seen any glowing reviews of *any* processor.)

Google does search very, very well, indeed. Payment processing, perhaps not as well by comparison. I don't really know.

I do believe that looking at the world through your anti-Google glasses has caused you to mistake me for a Google cheerleader. (The Us vs Them view point is quite popular here on OSNews.) I have great respect for Google as a company. But don't think that it bothers me when someone points out one of the many other areas where they are not superior to the competition at this time.

Edited 2008-05-23 06:13 UTC

So does Google for Google checkout. I find it amusing that Google the all mighty search giant with all those resources has to pay people to use checkout because paypal is beating it so badly. ;-)

The Google fanboys are out in force today. They mod down anything which questions pro-Google dogma.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with your charming personality.

"Criticize MS all you want, I got 40 bucks back from a laptop purchase. If MS wants to share the wealth, I'm going to take full advantage of it."

It shouldn't be surprising that the people that are unwillingly sponsoring your laptop has opinions about it.

If someone else tried to sell you stuff you really needed where 80% of the price was pure profit for them you probably would complain too.
Even if the noble goal was for them to take a bigger part of a market they couldn't get without funding it with your money.

Edited 2008-05-25 09:06 UTC