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Microsoft Corp. said on Monday its Web search business remains on a "positive trajectory" with plans to roll out several updates over the next 12 months.Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services group, said the company is building on momentum after its Windows Live Search gained market share over competitors in the quarter ended in June.
"Over the next 12 months, we've got a very aggressive engineering plan with multiple releases of search coming forward. So, I think we are on a positive trajectory," Johnson said in an interview.
Microsoft says: "Web search on "positive trajectory" [uk.reuters.com]
[edited by: BillyS at 12:04 pm (utc) on Aug. 14, 2007]
I spent an hour yesterday trying to figure out why all of our AdCenter ads suddenly stopped running. Emailed their Support - no response. Called their Support - talked to someone who tried to tell me my bid wasn't high enough. I explained that ALL of our ads at once stopped showing. She said she'd "look into it and call me tomorrow." They are so far behind in understanding search it is laughable.
Complete and utter incompetence.
"Over the next 12 months, we've got a very aggressive engineering plan with multiple releases of search coming forward. So, I think we are on a positive trajectory," Johnson said in an interview.
Let's welcome the initiative, rather than simply moan and groan about the current status. This is a forward looking prediction where they are aware of the issues and are intending to make changes. Constructive criticism will help them, and us.
In one year from now and there is no change, then we are entitled to gripe.
The only possible trajectory for Live.com is positive.
I love that quote.
"So, I think we are on a positive trajectory"
The key to the statement was "I Think we are" rather than "We Are On"
The entire problem with microsoft is that "They Think" they have an improving search engine yet webmasters know its a complete bag of nails and they need to start again, yet they dont see it or have done anything about it.
And for the record do you remember what "Bill Gates" said back on the 25th November 2005 in an interview with Information Week?:-
MSN Search Will Soon "More than Match" Google in Terms of Relevance
Its almost two years on now since Bills statement and put simply they still havent delivered.
Short of them buying Yahoo or reverting back to the old msn/yahoo arrangement of search i cant see anything changing for the better unless they absolutely take the current search engine apart and start again - but time will tell i guess.
The search facility cant get worse anyway
A trajectory is an imagined trace of positions followed by an object moving through [cyber]space.
Some common examples of trajectories:
(i) the path taken by a falling body, and (ii) the orbit of a spacecraft.
[en.wikipedia.org...]
I think MS have progressively lost user loyalty in virtually every sector the operate in over the last few years, because they really haven't stepped up to the plate when they're really needed to.
With respect to Web-search specifically; I've been utterly flabbergasted with how low-quality their offerings have been. From cross-platform/browser display issues, to poor user interface, to extremely poor results. I don't know what their Quality Assessment process is like, but it flat out doesn't work (neither for search, nor for any of their products).
they've ranted in the past about outperforming google "in the near future"...
A million smart kids could easily explain Gates and Ballmer wky allmost 100% of their IT products are failures.
But MS is not even able to communicate with anyone. That's why it has been decided to forget about them and to even block their useless Live search crawler which is only consuming huge bandwidth without sending any traffic.
btw. w2k still beats xp :-) not to mention this vista
that's why it has been decided to forget about them and to even block their useless Live search crawler which is only consuming huge bandwidth without sending any traffic.
I've considered that... I'm pretty well referenced in certain bits of Live but never see a jot of traffic compared to yahoo and google. I wonder if there is anyone using the service.
I don't think starting from scratch will work. They were supposed to have done that with algorithmic search - you know, the one that was supposed to bury google. To build a good generic search engine is so much more than just having a good algo, it is about intelligence. The kind of stuff Google has been gathering for years from its spider's web of products.
Yes, live search needs some improvements, but it has improved, they're opening up lots of new products & services around it and developing a good brand/platform.
I like the targeting and demographics and click reporting i get out of live and adcenter. Through lots of hard work and data harvesting i can do that with my google traffic as well, but its nice having it online within reach.
I don't know how long, but it's back. Interestingly each of these sites has the same exact 25 words on them and they offer the user Zero help.
From my point of few it would be better to stop that operation and give further investment cap to some charity.
I believe it's not just the bad search results that's a problem. The "Live" brandname - it's about the blandest and bleachest one I've ever heard. How is that name going to inspire any enthusiasm in anyone? "Hotmail" and "MSN" sound lots better.
The live brand name is growing every day. Between the 7 million xbox users who live on "live" and those migrating over in other applications its a good start.
MSN is so yesterday competing against AOL. Hotmail is someone elses brand varnished as being "Slaughtered by MS".
live.com is a new group of smaller teams working faster to rollout more applications and it seems to be doing pretty well.
has some quirks to work out and the branding could use a standardization on the interface. I would like live more if i could set a profile for lite/heavy or choose a theme as well
[edited by: Receptional at 5:08 pm (utc) on Aug. 16, 2007]
[edit reason] Dupe post [/edit]
