Microsoft Improves their Search Engine, Gives Bad Examples

In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced the latest updates to their Live Search Engine.

Core Relevance Improvements

According to the blog post, you can now use Microsoft’s Live Search to find the secret location of the Microsoft taco truck. I’ve spent years searching for that damn truck! Where have you been all my life Core Relevance!!!

Reduced Spam

Microsoft says, “We’re always going to be fighting people who threaten the integrity of our results by using illegitimate or malicious techniques. With this release of Live Search you should find the amount of spam is down quite considerably.”

What’s interesting is the first two results returned by their “taco truck” example above link directly to a site full of spam links.

“You might ask how we know spam is down? Experts on our team take a ‘randomly selected and statistically significant’ set of searches and measure the percentage of spam in the results.” — I guess “Microsoft taco truck” wasn’t statistically significant…

Dramatically Improved “Snippets”

“Snippets”? Oh! You mean the “description”, got it.

• No more Javascript Issues
• Popular Acronyms are “expanded” (FBI turns into “Federal Bureau of Investigation”)
• Navigational links indented in the first result
• More to come…

Bigger Index

Microsoft Live now searches 20 billion web pages. Four times the size of their previous index. “Enough said”, says Microsoft.

So, what does Google have to say about it?
According to Google, “Search engines’ published metrics for index size measurement vary greatly and are no longer easily comparable. Often, for instance, web crawlers retrieve duplicate entries for one page or links to documents that they haven’t crawled, and whose content thus isn’t in the index. At Google we believe the essential quality of an index isn’t the total number of documents, but its comprehensiveness – which unique documents are in the index. So we don’t count duplicate or uncrawled pages. According to our internal testing, our newly expanded search index is more than three times larger than that of any other search engine.”

Hmm… Interesting.

Make Assumptions

Microsoft explains, “It’s our job to be doing the smart thing to figure out what people really mean.” Which means, that Live Search will now assume it knows what you want to say. In their example, they assume that when you type in “nw”, you really mean to type in “northwest”.

Does this apply to the Paid Results? Um… no.
Again, using their “nw” example, we tried a few things on our own. It turns out the assumptions are only made for the organic search results. It doesn’t seem to be used within their paid advertising. If you type in ‘northwest care’, you get sponsored sites for ‘northwest’ and ‘care’. if you type in ‘nw care’, you get the same organic results, but the sponsored sites are now mainly about ‘care’, it doesn’t seem to know that ‘nw’ is the same as ‘northwest’.