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No sooner does Marissa Meyer switch to local search (incidentally, the area that I work in at Bing), than I start seeing quality issues with the Google home page. A search for 'time series data' today on Google, while indicating 34M results, only provided 4 links on the first results page. I'm surprised to see this type of error on Google's core property, and suspect it was some bad interaction between instant search results and my hitting the return key.
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I have noticed similar thing on October 12th and is posted on my blog http://cijo.i.ph/blogs/cijo/?p=102
Posted by: Cijoaj2003 | October 24, 2010 at 02:11 AM
Hahahaaa... you guys at Microsoft are so desperate you pick any lame excuse you can find out there, you are so pathetic!
Posted by: Wael Kfoury | October 24, 2010 at 04:49 PM
Wael - As an engineer working for the under-dog, I'm very interested in the quality of the competing product. Bing competes with Google not just in terms of raw relevancy, but also in terms of interface design. Testing of the UI as a key piece of the product will become more important to Google going forward. Currently, they don't appear to be completely on it. I just conducted a search which gave me 410 results. Getting to the last page I was asked if I wanted to see the search rerun with the 'omitted' results added. This gave me a result set of 316 links and again the question - we omitted some results, do you want to rerun with them included. Pretty flaky.
And as for lame excuses, I would consider the first page of results as being the most important aspect of any search product. If I can't nitpick there, then where? The empty search box?
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | October 25, 2010 at 01:17 AM
Furthermore, another search, for 'site:oilcrisis.com filetype:xls' produces a full page of results, but with the text 'About 3 results'.
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | October 25, 2010 at 02:27 AM
... it seems that Google is being used intensively by the Bing team...oops. but the post just shows the high expectations on Google - which is a testimony of their track record in quality.
Unfortunately some of the software giants have lowered our expectations so much that quality issues don't come as a surprise.
Posted by: Soulconsults | October 25, 2010 at 10:39 AM