"Why on
earth does the world need another search engine?", asks the new Live Search promotional site. In addition to that
website, as John Battelle's
Searchblog reports, Microsoft has launched a campaign for Live Search with digital
and print ads in major newspapers - New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Seattle
Times/PI, SF Chronicle, USAPicture 7-5 Today.
The Live Search promotion site also quotes Battelle from his book The Search: "Search is at best 5% solved--we're not even in the double digits of its potential."
That's something that Google no doubt agrees with. Google's execs are regularly quoted as saying search is far from a solved problem. Take this Marissa Mayer quote from a recent InternetWeek article:
'As successful as Google's search engine is, Mayer feels it could be better. "Search is superprimitive," she said. "It's disappointing that it's not advancing as much as we had hoped."'
I imagine 5% is about equal to "superprimitive".
In the Live Search promotions, Microsoft points out practical improvements to search like its slider bar and maps. On another page explaining Live Search, the opening line is: "Say hello to the next generation of search". There's also some competitive jibing (see screenshot below).
Yet, apart from the slider bar on the image search (which is cool, I admit), I really don't see much evidence of innovation on Live Search. Is there anything new that Google, Yahoo or Ask don't already have? Not much, no. Things like Instant Answers are nice, but the others have similar features.
I don't mean to rag on Microsoft here, because I generally have been impressed by its Windows Live strategy. It's just that I don't see much to back up Microsoft's claims of innovation and "next generation" for Live Search -- am I missing something? There's nothing wrong with a bit of competitive bluster, but pretty soon Live Search is going to have to come up with the goods to back it up.
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I think it's important to remember that if there's no alternatives, there's no incentive for anyone to improve. If Google were the only player in town, there would be no reason for them to improve their product. In fact I've written several times about the fact that Google could easily shut down the Made-for-Adsense pages that are polluting their search results, but they would actually lose money if they did so because they make money off of those pages. Their revenue would actually decline if their product improved. If they had no competition they could easily leave those pages up forever with no consequences--the only hope to keep Google honest is to have viable alternatives in the market.
Posted by: Jason Kolb | October 30, 2006 5:44 AM
That's a great point Jason.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 30, 2006 12:10 PM
Meanwhile, Google's quietly working on fixing real problems with search. Live Search isn't bad, though - but it isn't the sliders that make it good - it the results you get. For instance I think they are better on the "new york hotel" search, as explained in my post.
Posted by: Nick Lothian | October 30, 2006 2:30 PM
I have to agree. Microsoft Live Search seems to be lacking. It has a web 2.0 feeling which is nice - but looks aren't everything, and definetly not enough to pull me from Google (and Wink).
Posted by: David Mackey | October 30, 2006 9:26 PM