Saturday, January 22, 2005

Bill's Gates' Search Comments

In this same article Bill Gates also made some interesting comments about search. I have linked to the pagewhere he begins to talk about search. I wanted to take a look at these as they are very revealing about Microsofts's plans and more importantly failed thinking about search.
Here's one quote,

"We've been in the search business even before Google was around"

This is quite true. MSN search has been around for years, powered by Inktomi, with ads from Overture. Despite being in the search business before Google they have not made a single innovation in web search. That said Bill thinks the business opportunity here is in "search." It's not. It's in "finding." It's about finding the right information. It's about finding the right business. It's about finding the right quote. But that's search in another word you might say. What search is really about is information and providing it within a contextual framework that makes sense. Google knows this which is why local search works at Google. That's why Google's digital library is so important. Google knows that being the gateway to reference material and trustworthy information is the future of search. MS doesn't. If they did, they would roll out Encarta as free resource. Instead they are keeping Encarta gated behind a subscription model with 4,500 articles for free. This makes Encarta much less useful than the Wikipedia. You cannot share the information (unless of course they have a Encarta subscription). Google realizes that web search is the end to the means of finding the right information - NOT finding the right web page.
Here's a money quote

Oh, sure, everybody is working on those things, but just take the idea of finding your local pizza place and doing that right; search doesn't do that well today. Search is really crummy today--it's just that it used to be really crummy, and now it's better, and there never was anything like this before. So most of the results people get back today are irrelevant results. Deep analysis can take us much further, and that's why we're investing a lot, and you'll see us more(sic) very rapidly.


This is a money quote because it shows Bill is certainly (eating his own dog food/drinking his own Kool Aid) because local search works perfectly at Google. Let's try a test case. I live in Las Vegas, NM. It's a small town with a population of roughly 19,000.

So I want to find the local pizza place at Google I type the following;
"Las Vegas NM pizza"
or
"pizza las vegas nm"
or
"pizza las vegas new mexico"

and I find all three pizza places in their local results section at the very top of the page with their addresses and phone numbers. This is because Google has thoughtfully bought a database from Axciom which contains all local United States businesses and preloaded their database.

When I try that at the MSN preview site I get total garbage. Result #1 is pretty close at USdiners.com but I actually have to go to the web site to actaully see. The next two results are for Las Vegas, NV. This despite the fact that I explicitly told the search engine where I was located. For those of you who want to try it here's a Las Vegas NM pizza on MSN search

What's even more interesting that there is a "Were you looking for 'pizza' near Las, Vegas, NM" at the top of the page. I think ok, this should enable me to narrow down the selections as it really understands that query. Clicking this link instead shortens the search term to just pizza so they can show me ads that they are hoping I click on. The #1 organic result is the OahuWiki followed by free pizza notice at UNM. Keep working MS. Realize that search is just about finding the information you need, not searching web pages. I was going to tackle search embedded with Longhorn, but this post is getting somewhat long. Soon I promise.