What Bugs You About Live Search?
Mon, Oct 1, 2007
Last week MSN launched a bunch of tremendous improvements Live Search. In spite of that there are still 2 major issues that I have with Live Search: depth of crawl and freshness of index.
What bugs you about Live Search?
October 1st, 2007 at 6:35 pm
The new look is comparable with changes elsewhere, but the thing that really bothers me is that they haven’t addressed the core value of search… relevancy.
I speak from experience monitoring the SERPs for competitive terms that I rank for and cannot believe that the results pages would be littered with the same domain for keywords. I have seen where 7 of the top ten are inhabited by the same URL (the root and 6 subdomains). The same URL is not even visible in Ask, Google or Yahoo.
Please be aware, this is not a rant! I am up there with multiple domains and subdomains too.
But, above all is the amount of traffic (really, a lack thereof). Microsoft really needs to start spending some time and energy in user acquisition and retention if they expect this to be a success. It’s too late for your office suite Bill.
Of course this is a catch 22, which comes first relevancy or users?
October 1st, 2007 at 9:11 pm
hey Stephen…
um, didja read Todd’s Searchification ‘live blog’ post? Relevancy is core to Microsofts strategy - worth a read for sure
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:28 am
Other than the name, relevancy, lack of traffic, search ad system that’s constantly got bugs and a general dislike of Microsoft I have no problems with it. They do rank our sites well, so perhaps we’re just spammers after all.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:07 am
Sites in first positions for competitve terms for sites with almost no traffic.
Title is too important
October 4th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Take it easy guys, they gotta walk before they can crawl
Are you folks sure that that the index and algo changes have rolled out properly yet in your area? I’m not expecting the full effect until the end of the month.
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:09 pm
From what I’ve seen, live search seems to place a huge emphasis on keywords in the domain name/URL.
It bug’s me because it seems like a lot of spammy long URL names are ranking ok in live search which really need to be weeded out.