Microsoft will be buying position for its Live Search on HP notebooks in 2009. Whoohooo. More “extras” in your next computer. I’m kind of surprised Toshiba didn’t make this announcement too, since they are one of the kings of crapware.

What’s interesting about this is which markets the Live team thinks they will be reaching here. It’s not going to be tech savvy students. For self-purchased machines, they’re sure to switch the settings and remove the extraneous toolbar. And for schoolwide purchased systems, they are sure to wipe out the system and install their own “builds.”

Maybe on the small business side, people will leave Live Search enabled, but where the greatest numbers of Live Search users will be, will come from people who are too lazy to make a change or don’t know how to do so. This sounds so AOL like.

I can’t say it’s a terrible way of getting Live Search out to people, but at this point I don’t think Live Search is compelling enough to make the switch to most. Sorry. It’s close, but not there. Were Live Search to be better, for students, for small business owners, then I’d be all over this. But it’s not. Not yet.

Microsoft is dumping Academic Search. Unbelievable.

Just how Microsoft thinks it’s going to compete head to head with Google without an education oriented search offering, I have no idea.

I’m stunned and perplexed.

Their explanation?

“…we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search engine, consumer, and content partner.”

So it’s the money. Go figure. A company worth billions can’t see how valuable it is to help billions….of people.

I’ve been a fan of growing “reference” material online as some of my work with ink-based front ends to search illustrate. Taking away Academic Search is going in the wrong direction. I need see no more. Live Search is doomed–not because of the technical side, but because of the business side. This decision makes it so obvious.

Looks like I’m not the only one stunned by this news.

I’m afraid this looks like the MSN-ification of search is continuing. So unfortunate.

Let me put it this way: The trend in search is towards micro-searches not all-in-one searches. That’s why there’s room for image search, video search, TechMeme, thredr, and on and on.

And let’s be clear there are several businesses built around academic “search” already. The dream, as I see it, is to try to decrease the cost of these services by providing a different model for them. The cost and access to journals is too high. What about conference proceedings? And videos of conferences themselves? We need ways to improve these. Not more effort to solidify the older, existing models which are too exclusionary. Sure the existing players are uneasy about this, but we all know they can change and adapt if they want to. There’s plenty of room for them in the future. Just look at what MIT is doing by making their classes available online. This is the right direction. Imagine an acedemic search that brings all the journals and the classroom material together under one roof. Now we’re talking. By merging academic content with commerce-focused content all into one index and then trying to make sense of it later is a terrible, terrible mistake and a poor decision. Now, maybe, just maybe, the Live team sees how it can put everything under one roof and still provide filtered and efficient access to it. Could be. But based on the team’s business-minded rationale for dumping academic search, I have my doubts.

Well, this leaves Google and Yahoo. And, if Microsoft acquires, Yahoo search, this means there will only be Google left. Think about that.

Microsoft’s Live Search is the talk of the day on TechMeme, not because of its search, but because of its cash back program. The basic idea is that you can get cash back for purchases you make when finding things via Live Search. There are about 200 partners in the program.

Cash back or rebate programs are nothing new. The auto industry uses them to drive sales all the time. And paying end users has been done before on the web, with less than stellar results. I guess it doesn’t matter how well the program goes for Microsoft though, as long as people chat it up. Consider it advertising.

The problem as I see it is that Microsoft looks more dot-com desperate here than 21st century cool and collected.

I don’t think most companies really want to promote super-price sensitivity anyway. Instead, they’d probably rather focus on “features.”

A subtle twist on their idea I think would make it much, much better. For instance, I wouldn’t do a Detroit-style cash back program, instead I’d join up with UPS and FedEx and provide free shipping for everyone, or free shipping upgrades, if the company already provides free shipping. This is a lot easier to communicate I think than a nebulous price-oriented cash back program. I think it sounds a lot more benevolant too.

When I switched my blog from Movable Type to WordPress, I double posted for awhile because many people, and TechMeme in particular, weren’t picking up my new RSS feed. Turns out Google didn’t like that and started labelling all of the links to my old blog as potentially “harmful.”

What a joke. What’s so ridiculous is that there are several sites that continually ripoff my content (in part or in total) and Google not once labels them as malicious. Is that because they have Google ads on them and spam or not Google makes money from them? I’m beginning to wonder.

Instead, Google thinks my blog is bad.

After months of asking Google to remove their warning from my site listings, I’m at an impass.

What should I do? Nothing?

I think not.

When you’re not treated well by a company, typically, what do you do? Move on. I think I’ve given Google enough time to address the issue. It’s been going on since February and nothing has happened outside of one email saying that it might take several weeks.

So here’s what I’m thinking. Google is so insistent on asserting that I’m bad, that I’m now asking myself why in the world I keep using them as my default search engine? Live Search doesn’t think I’m bad. Yahoo doesn’t either for that matter. It’s just Google.

I’m a little bit uneasy to remove Google search. I’ve been using Google for so long it’s like a lifeline. However, Live Search results are pretty good nowadays, so I think I could survive. Hmmm.

What do you think? Should I change all my search engine defaults? Or give Google a few more months and just take the slap in the face every time I search for my archived content on Google? Eh.

After TechCruch’s comments the other day about how terrific the new natural language aware PowerSet.com search would be I was eager to check it out. I was going to sign up for the beta and then I decided to wait for the launch. I didn’t have to wait long. It’s up now. Check it out.

I admit I am quite skeptical about the Powerset venture. The “core” of the product may be from Xerox Parc, but I’ve seen lots of people try to throw technology at search and see it come up short. My skepticism was telling me that this was to be another case.

Powerset is trying to leverage natural language processing to improve the quality of search. Rather than go for indexing tons of web pages they decided to focus on the semantics and what they could glean from Wikipedia (in one case). Half of this makes sense. The focusing on Wikipedia part. I’m completely guessing about the NLP side and from this part I’m guessing they focused too much on the NL and not enough on flat out the semantics regardless of any technique.

Anyway, so now that Powerset has launched I decided to do a 20 second test and I think many people will be surprised at the results, but not in the way you might think.

Here’s what I did. I searched for the difference between Tablet PCs and UMPCs:

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The results were much like I expected. It’s hard to tell if any of the results targetted the query I gave.

Of course, I was being a bit unfair with my question. So I split it up into two parts. First, I asked what a Tablet PC is:

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And then “What is a UMPC?”:

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It’s just my opinion, but neither sets of results are that good. And what’s with the semantic summary at the top of the query results? What does it mean for UMPC features to be “system and low.” And worse, what does it mean for UMPC to “takes” “flight.” I can guess, knowing what I know about the market, but why am I guessing? I am performing the query supposedly because I don’t know the answer.

I’m not surprised by the poor quality of these results though, because Wikipedia has a small draw and being community driven it’s going to have a disproportionate voice that doesn’t “get” Microsoft’s efforts. And as a complete guess I wasn’t surprised to see the UMPC and Tablet PC to fall into this category.

So unimpressed with my 20-second Powerset search I decided to try Google. I asked it “What is the difference between a Tablet PC and a UMPC?” Not too bad. From what I see the third link is to an article entitled “How to buy a UMPC or Tablet PC”. Hmmm. That might give me a pretty good description of the differences I presume.

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Not completely satisfied though, I decided to try Live. For the same query, here’s it’s results:

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My. My. Look at this. The first link is to a forum post that is titled: “What is the difference between Convertable and Hybrid tablets.” Kind of close in terms of it being a comparison, but actually the link is of mediocre quality and a bit off target. I’m looking for a comparison between Tablet PCs and UMPCs.

The second link is a another so-so match. It’s titled “So what’s the difference between the Samsung Q1 and Q1B?” Both of these are UMPCs. Not qiute right.

Link 3 is getting warmer though–at least the title is more suggestive: “Define the Ultra-Mobile PC.” However, if you follow the link to Gottabemobile, it’s more about what UMPCs are and their differences with low-cost PCs, such as the Eee PC.

Scanning down the page though, you’ll see several articles with titles including the phrase “what is the difference between…”. Although none of them are exact matches, this does suggest that Live Search is placing greater sorted emphasis on content that also contains mention of at least UMPC or Tablet PC. Not bad. In fact the bottom two links on the page are “Difference between a MID vs UMPC” and “What is a UMPC.” If you read through this article, sure enough it compares in bits and pieces UMPCs to Tablet PCs. To me, although the artile is biased towards talking about a UMPC, it’s hands down a winner.

(Note: The Live query results aren’t very good if plural keywords are used, such as Tablet PCs and UMPCs. So the stemming logic in Live isn’t so hot. Not terrible. Just not as good as it could be.)

Yahoo search with the same query gives a valient effort too by strongly matching against the phrase “What is the difference between…” However I dont’ see articles that are strong matches, although I do see mentions of Tablet PCs and UMPCs which lead me to believe that with a little digging I might figure it out.

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I also tried Ask.com, but the results weren’t that good though there is a sidebar in which you supposedly could narrow the search by clicking on “Definition of a Tablet PC” and “What is the Tablet PC used for.” Of course, the narrowing list doesn’t mention anything about UMPCs. So I left this out.

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So, my conclusion after a couple of 20-second queries is this: I’ll stick with Google and Live with Yahoo in third place. Powerset? Well, maybe if I just want to search Wikipedia.

Was this a fair test? No. I really need to do more tests. However, it is in a domain I know something about and I’d expect any search engine to handle well. It’s not that obtuse a topic. Now, maybe I’m using the Powerset search engine “wrong” and another form of queries would do well. I’ll be watching out for the experiences of other bloggers.

An aside: Michael Arrington gives kudos to Powerset for returning good results for the query “when did earthquakes hit tokyo” and suggests that people try Google to see how good Powerset is. Well, he’s right. The results from Powerset return the first hit with “The special wards of Tokyo are as follows: ….Tokyo was hit by powerful earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855, and 1923.” A very good match for earthquakes in the last few hundred years. The results from Goole aren’t that spectacular. However, if you search for “wikipedia when did earthquakes hit tokyo,” you’ll be surprised. The third hit to “Dogpile” has the phrase…”Tokyo was hit by powerful earthquakes in 1703, 1782, 1812, 1855 and 1923. The 1923 earthquake , with an estimated.” This is the exact same phrase Powerset returned.

Yes, Google could tweak their results to take into account language more. You can see that in how Live and Yahoo appeared to have good results with my earlier queries. But is this a tweak to Google or a $100M business?

Update: Danny Sullivan does a much better job of explaining the potential value of Powerset. I don’t agree with him about the value of the semantic summaries (their value applies when you already know the meaning behind the sparse words) and in terms of the outline I think he’s right, it looks like there’s potential there. However, this means that the content will have to be contained within Powerset. That may work under Wikipedia’s license, but not other content. So I’m confused how far this is going to go. Now if Powerset wants to leave it at being a better host for Wikipedia content, that’s one thing. But a general search engine? That’s another.

Do you know what Live Search thinks I look like: Search http://search.msn.com/images with “loren heiny” filter:face.

By the way, this is not my sister either, Lora:

And I wonder, what does it mean that when you search for the face of Warner Crocker it comes up with Bill Clinton? Long lost cousins?

Microsoft’s Live Search News or is that Search News Live or Live News Search or ….ugh….anyway….the search that searches news on the MSN domain, yeah that one, has added RSS feeds to its latest incarnation of its news search results. For example, here’s the feed for “Tablet PC:” http://search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?q=tablet+pc&form=QBNB&format=rss.

For those of you like me who sometimes type in URLs for no good reason, the RSS feed for a search term can be widdled down to this:

http://search.msn.com/news/?q=SEARCHTERM&format=rss

For instance, to search for Tablet PC, you can use the much shorter:

http://search.msn.com/news/?q=tablet+pc&format=rss

I’m not sure what form=QBNB means. With my 40+ year old eyes I don’t see what the difference is with and without it. I’m guessing it controls the layout of the query results somehow and QBNB is the default. Yeah, that’s a total guess on my part.

By the way, I don’t see yet how to bring up the RSS directly from the Live Search text box. I tried this for “Tablet PC”:

http://www.live.com/?&scope=news&q=tablet+pc&format=rss

but it doesn’t return the RSS. Hmm. It does return the search results, however, (ignoring the format part of the URL) and on this results page you can select RSS feed.

I’m so glad the Live team has added this feature. It’s time to update thredr.

Now if only the Live Search team would fix up the RSS feeds for the mainstream search so it can return just the “info strip” at the top of some searches. For instance, if I search for “1+2″, on the live site, the search results returns the mathematical answer “3″ at the top of the results:

Yes, call me silly, but being able to query the Live engine for more than just “search results” is quite powerful. It’s a tiny step into controlling the context. You see there’s so much more that “search” engines can be doing and to return the results formatted as RSS is a great communication pathway for applications to hook into the results and leverage them.

For instance, check out this math tip (Silverlight required) at http://www.TabletPCPost.com/math:

See how I can handwrite a math problem into the input area and then send the query to Google? Google is “smart” enough to realize that this is probably a math problem, so it returns the math results cleanly. Live Search doesn’t. We could debate whether this or that implementation is correct, however, what I’d really like to see, neither service implements. What I want is to be able to tell the engine what the context is that I’m looking for. In this case I want a math answer. I’d also like the results in RSS format if I request it so I can programmatically use the results. So, for Live Search, I’d like something like:

http://search.msn.com/?q=1+%2B+2&form=MATH&format=rss

Now, yes, I can get the RSS feed from Live Search for 1 + 2, but notice if I do, it does not return the math results. I can appreciate why. In terms of the context of searching, the math results may not be what you want. But what happens if they are? Imagine a program trying to get to very specific results like my math Tip does. If the search engine was implemented correctly, it could return just the results desired–via RSS. Now this would be extremely powerful.

You could have RSS results (ready for eager programmers to devour) for math, definitions, encyclopedia lookups, and on and on. If you free yourself from even thinking in terms of text (or the user having to type text even if it is ultimately a text query to the user, such as the math Tip does) then there are even more interesting possibilities. Think about graphs or physics or diagrams. OK, I’m probably losing most everyone at this point, but in your downtime, suspend disbelief a little and dream–dream big. There are some amazing possibilities here–at least in terms of one direction I can see search going.

Yeah, I’ve blogged about all of this before, but the possibility still excites me. Someday….