Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Search opportunity

Kara Swisher posted today an internal MSFT memo regarding their new new new search initiative. It was particularly interesting for me as earlier today, I downloaded Xmarks to enhance my search experience, through their service that aggregates bookmarks as a way of discovering relevant sites.

I find that Google is fine for many things but the cat and mouse SEO game is continuing to hurt the quality of relevant sites displayed. Moreover, the mostly simple text display is not too helpful in facilitating a decision to click or not; there are just too many 'false positives'.

Back to MSFT, here's an excerpt that seems to highlight why I, and many others, are looking for alternatives. I am not ready to through away my love for Google, but it seems as if there wonderful opportunity available to bring the search experience forward as:

40% of queries go unanswered
half of queries are about searchers returning to previous tasks
46% of search sessions are longer than 20 minutes

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