steveb - 9:57 pm on Mar 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

"Why should MSN show the same results as Google or Yahoo?"

They shouldn't but they should show useful results.

"That's not only boring but unhelpful."

Not at all. The same results on all three enginbes would be very helpful, if they were the best results.

There is absolute zero value to users in "different". Webmasters have some lousy priorities. Users do not wander from engine to engine looking for "different". They look for the best web pages that relate to their search term(s).

MSN is a bad engine because it highly values rotten web pages, and it gets no points for offering variety.

The ideal search engine would return results that in the eyes of God are ranked exactly according to the needs/desires of the user. We aren't within a galaxy of that, but someday the holy grail is when all search engines will return perfect results.