Accept no substitutes

M$googleKiller released

Microsoft announced their long anticipated Google Killer today. Announced as Beta, the search’s has several small innovations — you get to search your desktop and Encarta from the same bar the way on Google you can search for text, images and news (which you can also do on MSN Search).
I ran a little search, singing of myself as Walt would, for paul jones (no quotes). Below are the results.

Paul Jones MSN Search Google Yahoo
web 14,288,684 (0.19 seconds) 14,700,000 (0.21 seconds) 9,510,000 (0.08 sec)
news 1,982 (0.10 seconds) 8,010 (0.34 seconds) 6,822
images 840 (0.68 seconds) 16,000 (0.08 seconds) 13,069 (0.08 sec)
encarta 150 (0.01 seconds)
n/a
n/a
groups
n/a
677,000 (0.23 seconds)
n/a
froogle/products
n/a
7,590 confirmed / 223,000 total results (0.19 seconds) 1,424
video (test)
n/a
110 (0.02 seconds) 44 (0.32 sec)

2 Comments

  1. Hugh Cayless

    Hi Paul! Hmmm….I have exactly the opposite naming problem. There is probably only one of me. Interesting for comparison’s sake though: an MSN search for “Cayless” is, gratifyingly, all about me (on the first page anyway), but one on Google tends to pull up a lot of news reportage from New Zealand/Australia about a couple of rugby players named Cayless. Only one entry (on the front page) is me, and it’s an abstract from a rather terrible paper I gave at the APA years ago. Google has more than twice as many hits too. I wonder if the discrepancy has to do with M$ using some geo-location relevancy ranking, or if they just don’t care about sports?

  2. Paul Jones

    Getting only the right results and no noise is called precission. Getting all of the good stuff but with some others is called recall. If you were to get only the good stuff and all of the good stuff, you would have high precision and high recall. In the real world of searching you rarely get both.
    My collegue, Catherine Blake, was pointing this out to me–in case I was completely clueless about the basics (no but with me it never hurts to check ;->).
    I then pointed out that a very large result set with me as the Top Paul Jones was a most excellent outcome! She started to agree.
    When searches for Catherine Blake showed her as the Top CB above the wife and the sister of William who were both named Catherine Blake, she too was satisfied with the results.

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