Microsoft - Just Do It!

From PCMAG this morning:

Microsoft said it will soon offer a search engine that is better, faster and more curious than previous versions.

How come you never hear Google coming out with such pronouncements? How come you never hear Google saying "Hey our next search engine is going to really rock"?

Because they just do it. Each year Microsoft comes out telling us how good their search engine is going to be and yet TPN's search stats still look like this:

Links from an Internet Search Engine
20 different referring search engines Percent Google 73.3 % MSN 12 % Yahoo 5.8 % Baidu 4 % Unknown search engines 1.7 % Ask Jeeves 0.7 % Dogpile 0.5 % AOL 0.5 % Alexa 0.1 % WebCrawler 0.1 % Search.com 0.1 % Earth Link 0 % MetaCrawler (Metamoteur) 0 % Lycos 0 % Google (Images) 0 % Kvasir 0 % AllTheWeb 0 % Mamma 0 % AltaVista 0 % Jubii 0 %

So Microsoft... just do it. Blow us away and we'll tell YOU how good it is.

So what improvements do I really want from a search engine?

1. MUCH better local search. Went looking for the phone number of a takeaway Greek restaurant that could deliver to my house last night. Had a hell of a time. Disaster. Took so long to try to find a result, that I gave up and ate cereal for dinner.
2. Better blog search options. Give me checkboxes in my search interface, letting me narrow my search down to recent blog entries, etc.

What other things would you like to see?

Comments

[Mark Cohen]

I'd love a straighforward search box with the ability to easily constrain the search by industry, like search only job boards, car sites, politics blogs etc. That'd rock.