Microsoft News Tracker

It’s slightly more than a year since Microsoft launched Live Search, and yesterday Microsoft held a press event dubbed Searchification at which a variety of enhancements were unveiled (see also the Live Search blog, the Live Search fact sheet, and Oilman’s stream of consciousness report). In a nutshell, the new, improved Live Search offers:

• Improved speed and cleaner user interface
• Index size increased fourfold and improved data extraction from indexed pages
• A variety of relevancy enhancements and expansion of the canned Live Instant Answer coverage
• Large investment in relevancy enhancement for the 40% of searches that fall in the areas of Entertainment, Shopping, Health, and Local.

I’m sure these enhancements are all to the good, particularly with regard to relevancy. It’s hard to measure relevancy in the abstract, but in the past I would occasionally toss Live Search a query and see what resulted. My impression was always that relevancy improvements were surely if not sorely needed.

Kicking the tires today in a nonscientific way, the Live Search results seemed better than in the past, but there was nothing that blew me away and convinced me that Live Search had to be my search engine. And that’s the rub. Since Web surfers are mostly in the habit of searching elsewhere, it is hard to see that any of these changes will cause them to alter their habits.