I’ve experimented with Microsoft’s "Live" search (remind me to go on a rant some other time about the stupidity of naming everything "Live" – shades of ".NET" eh?) and I keep going back to Google.
One thing on Live Search that I’ve found that I really don’t like is the use of a redirection page. If you run a search on Google for, say, "Cars", the first non sponsored entry is Cars.com. If you look at the URL that you would be going to when you click on the Cars.com entry, you’ll see that it points you to "http://www.cars.com". If you run the same search on Live Search (or whatever it’s called, there’s actually no branding on the page except for Live Beta), you’ll find that a subsite of Cars.com (for Central Arizona) is the first link. If you look at the URL that you would be going to if you clicked the link, you’ll see that it starts with "http://g.msn.com" and after that follows a lot of other stuff, including somewhere nested in there, a redirect to the actual site.
What does this mean in the real world?
Two things:
1) Apparently Microsoft is tracking which items you visit from the searches. I doubt this is being done for "evil" purposes, probably just to improve their search results.
2) Clicking on a link from the Live site is slower than clicking on one from Google. When you click on one from Google, you go straight to the site. When you click on it from MSN, er, Live it is much slower as the request first goes to an MSN server and then you are redirected to the target site, resulting in several unnecessary round trips.
Item #2 (along with the worse results, an Arizona subsite of Cars.com is the first link?) is enough to keep me on Google. Keep trying Microsoft!
– Eric.
PS: While scrolling through the Live result set in order to see if a bug with going "back" in the browser when using their site had been fixed, it crashed IE.