Live Search vs. Google
Just did some maintenence for my family PC and reinstalled WinXP. Wanted to give it a quick makeover, so went looking for the Zune desktop theme. Decided that I’ll give Live Search a shot, since that box was there in my IE7.
Attempt #1, keywords: Zune Theme
Note that the first link, zune.net, while it’s the official Zune website it does not have a download link for the desktop theme. So..
Attempt #2, keywords: Zune Desktop
Attempt #3, keywords: Zune Desktop Theme
I knew that there was an official download link from microsoft.com which I wanted to use, so the last result shown above in the 3rd attempt (download.com), was not acceptable. Note that there eventually were similar download links in later search results (for all 3 attempts), but just not the one I wanted.
A little frustrated, I decided to see how Google would fair.
Attempt #1, keywords: zune desktop
There we go.
Just in case you’re wondering how the other keywords would work on Google,
Now, I’m not saying that Live Search sucks completely. It’s had its (rare) moments for me. However this case is especially surprising since the thing I’m looking for is not only a Microsoft product, but hosted on the microsoft.com, and yet it failed to show up as the first hit, or even the first 5 hits. Something is wrong here, no?
