Why would you switch search engines?
Stéphane asks why any one would switch from Google given that it has become such a part of net culture.
People will switch for a faster time-to-answer.
Recently I needed to find the Microsoft Knowledge Base article that explained why you shouldn't run IE components (such as MSHTML) inside a server process. I knew the KB existed, but I didn't have the URL off-hand and I needed to send it to a co-worker.
That meant I needed to search for it, and like everyone else in the world I first went to Google, but it didn't answer my question directly. Below I have added some additional "analysis" for your enjoyment.
My search query, stated in the most natural way (at least for me), is "Why can't I run MSHTML on the server?"
Here are the results for some common search engines:
· Google -- Some interesting hits, but nothing looks good (note I'm only skimming titles, not the excerpts)
· Yahoo -- Pretty much the same as Google
· MSN -- Pretty much the same as Google
· MSN (Beta) -- LOL! My Firefox blog comes up first, for no apparent reason!
· Microsoft -- My mum always said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"
OK, so that didn't work.
I decided that natural language isn't going to work, and I also remembered that the KB tends to specifically talk about ASP (rather than servers in general) so I rephrase my question to "MSHTML ASP not supported":
· Google -- Nope
· Yahoo -- Nope
· MSN -- Nope
· MSN (Beta) -- Some interesting-looking results, but nope
· Microsoft -- It's the last result on the first page, but it's there: https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;244085
As you can see, none of the engines are perfect (and really, Microsoft's search of its own web site should be able to do better...). Admittedly, we could do a much better job with our metadata in KB articles to match "expected" search queries, but ideally the technology should work for us, not the other way around.
Searching aimlessly wastes time, and time is money. I wasted (say) five minutes of my time getting this query for my co-worker, since I had tried several variations and followed several dead-ends before hitting success with "MSHTML ASP not supported". Note that in this case I knew exactly what I was looking for, so I only had to scan the titles. Imagine if I had had to click on every single link returned by every search result to determine if it was what I wanted or not? I could have wasted hours.
Now imagine if every Microsoft employee spent five minutes a day on searching. That's about fifty thousand people times five minutes, or...
·250,000 minutes; or
·4,167 hours; or
·174 days; or
·25 weeks; or
·6 months
That's unbelievable -- we'd lose six person-months of productivity every single day if each employee spent five minutes on a simple search task. Obviously, there are other things we lose much more than six person-months of productivity on every day... like toilet breaks... but they're somewhat unavoidable.
If there was a search engine that could translate a natural-language search to the correct result the first time, every time, Microsoft (and every other company on the planet) would save a boat-load of cash because their employees would be more productive. And it's not just about the evil money-grabbing corporations, either. Say you have a screaming baby or a bleeding nose or a leaking toilet and you want to make it stop. Would you rather get the answer in five minutes, or in five seconds? :-) [Google, Yahoo, MSN, MSN (Beta), Microsoft - LOL]
I'm not saying that Microsoft (or anyone else, for that matter) could ever solve this problem, but the point is that people will switch to a better product. Remember when DEC's AltaVista was the search engine back in the day? I even had their version of "desktop search" installed on my home machine almost a decade ago... the more things change, the more they stay the same.
[Oh and please don't bother posting any comments about "switching to a better product" and Firefox... I already know what you're going to say ;-) ]
Comments
- Anonymous
January 15, 2005
Another place you can search when you are looking for KB articles is the KB search site at http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx (Q244085 is 8th on the list there). - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
Hi, Peter: FWIW, I found the article on my first attempt (fourth result) with this query: <http://www.google.com/search?q=not+run+MSHTML+on+server+site%3Asupport.microsoft.com>. If you know you're looking for a KB article, Google's site: search can usually find it pretty quickly. - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
What most people are looking for is "authoritative answers" and simply timely lists of "search results". That is, authoritative answers that are 1. timely but also 2. relevent and 3. complete.
The best example is to think of the last time you received a response/resolution from a support call (a form of human-mediated answer searching). Whether it is a help desk, a product support organization, etc. how many times did the answer fail to be relavent or complete or it took too long.
People should be looking to search engines for authoritative answers ...not just lists of "search results". - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
Yeah, I actually have a shortcut setup for googling site:microsoft.com but for some reason this time it didn't work.
Maybe I was in too much of a hurry to actually think of a good query that I spent longer trying lots of bad queries ;-)
But... that's the point! ;-) The technology needs to take our first attempt at a search (and no weird syntax like site:microsoft.com) and give us good, authoritative, timely results. - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
Using quotes around "not supported" helps a lot:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=MSHTML+%22not+supported%22+server+asp - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
Most developers find that using google to search Microsoft's web site is far quicker and more accurate than using Microsoft's own search engine.
As far as using the site:support.microsoft.com tag, that's merely a shorthand (and convenience). You may, instead, use google's advanced search page for the same results. - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 15, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 16, 2005
"MSHTML on server site:microsoft.com" does it for me. - Anonymous
January 16, 2005
That LinkTron 5000 is pretty cool ;-)
Stephane: Sure, you can get a good result... but the trouble today is that you have to write a query that the engine is happy with. Ideally the engine should be happy with the query you write. - Anonymous
January 16, 2005
The amusing thing is that this blog entry now shows up as #3 on Google, so they have improved in the last few days :) - Anonymous
January 17, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 17, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 21, 2005
ironic perhaps, but when i am looking for answers on a microsoft problem i usually start with technet. when that fails (which is invariably the case) i go to google and this often (3 times in 4 say) points me back to a technet document that answers my question!
the problem can only get worse - the more information humans generate the harder it is for humans to find what humans need! ;-) - Anonymous
February 13, 2005
The lost person-days is actually more drastic than you have surmised. You appear to have made a common error when calculating the lost time, and that is that people will work 247365. In reality, this just doesn't happen. If you factor a 8 hour work day, 40 hour work week and 50 week working year you get:
·250,000 minutes; or
·4,167 hours; or
·521 days; or
·104 weeks; or
·25 months; or
·2 years 1 month
This is the actual work time lost. This is a remarkable amount of productivity lost to such a trivial task.