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google me this, google me that...

  • 아티클

Ok, I admit, Google is my starting home page. Its wonderful, easy, simple, fun, and yes, it has captivated me. I’m a google-r. Its mind-boggling how a webpage so freakingly trivial-looking feeds on top off all this complex search infrastructure and database servers… But who cares? I search for something, and I find it on there.

Every-so-often, I tell people to “google” for things, and then think later about how I should’ve told them to “msn-search” for it, instead. Quite honestly though, MSN search doesn’t always give me what I look for. And I have tried! I really have… I have tried plenty to the point where I ask myself why I should be spending twice the amount of time – msn-searching for something first, and then having to google it later to find the result. And, please do not misunderstand me. I’m all about dog-fooding, and its importance. But, what exactly apart from “ummm… msn’s search thingie didn’t find my blog but google did” or “google found my high-school CompSci teacher but msn-search didn’t” can I feed back to the product team? How is this inconsequential feedback going to help MSN search make its engine better?

A few weeks ago, I ordered myself an i-mate sp3i (awesome phone, by the way). The shop that I ordered it from sent me a tracking number via email. Considering the recent state-of-affairs of my brain, I pretty mindlessly picked up the tracking number from my email, and that’s right, plopped it in to google’s search page and hit enter. And guess what showed up – a link to the UPS tracking website with my tracking number filled in to the URL query string. Something so freakin’ simple, and it makes me want to keep google as my default home page and search page. Why would I ever want to care about having to remember www.ups.com or www.fedex.com, or any other URL for that matter? If you were to think about it, how difficult is that to do, really?

Where have we gone awry?

PS: At the risk of sounding blasphemous, should msn-search simply consider wiring their search to google’s?
PPS: I just did a spell-check on this post, and “google” was not recognized as a word…
PPPS: We ought to come up with another name for “MSN search”, one that has the potential for becoming a verb

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2005
    I think MSN search's biggest problem is that saying "just msn-search it" sounds infinitely more stupid than "just google it". They need to find a name that we can easily turn into a verb like "google" :)

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2005
    Being a heretic is a very important - but sometimes difficult - position. :) That's a really killer scenario you just described. Another current favorite of mine is sending google a text message from my phone when not near a computer - with the search results coming back in just a few seconds to the phone. TXT Message 'movies: 27514' to 46645. Oh, and another verb: Skype me. :)

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2005
    if you shorten it, it doesn't sound THAT stupid, but an idea would be to just 'MSearch it'.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2005
    Steve-o,

    MSearch isn't doing it for me... MSearch... I dont know. But then again, who am I to say? I'd patent it.

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2005
    Try this - it's great.
    http://wsm.directtaps.net/

    MSN Search Results Clustering.

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    June 17, 2009
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