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 Microsoft is famous for
its widely-used but buggy computer operating system. This keeps Microsoft for being famous for its buggy, hardly-ever-used,
rushed-to-the-market, stinko search engine.
During the summer of 2004, Microsoft launched a shockingly bad, pre-alpha search engine. For nearly two years following that,
the results improved virtually not at all. During the summer of 2006, MSN search improved from appalling to merely very poor.
By the spring of 2007, the MSN results had improved to the point that they probably surpassed Yahoo in terms of quality, but
unfortunately the story doesn't stop there.
MSN search is apparently the place where all the extra Windows bugs go to die. MSN Search seems incapable of understanding
moved permanently, 301 redirects. Notice the cache of
this "page". The worst part of this
phenomenon though is not only do they cache the error page, but in many cases they discard the REAL page, saving the error
page as the content of the URL. Additionally, the problem with 301 redirects leads to MSN improbably ranking the fifth or
sixth or even twentieth most relevant page from a domain as
the top result from that domain.
This is as stupidly incompetent as a search engine can be... and that is the product the multiple billion dollar Microsoft
Corporation inflicts on the public.
Another bit of pathetic-ness on MSN's part is an idiotic policy of geolocating all searches... meaning the results on
msn.com and msn.co.uk are completely different for "poker", "neptune" and "uranium" searches.
MSN is better than before, but it has far too many obvious problems to really be taken seriously as a search engine at
this point... and of course the public agrees. Microsoft's nine-figure TV ad campaigns have lead to LESS people using
the search engine. Once users sample it, they run to Google as fast as they can. |
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