mMicrosoft put out its own search engine on its MSN Web site, today. This, after admitting that it totally missed the boat sailed by Google Inc. and others. While one can argue the merits of putting a lot of resources into searching the web, I thought I’d at least take a look.
I did a quick search for "Merck Teva Fosomax" on MSN and on Google in a head-to-head search comparison (yes, I know, not a scientifically valid test but that’s all I had time for today). Interestingly, MSN pulled up 11,301 web results and Google pulled up 10,600. Given that it’s newer, I expected MSN to pull up fewer spots. More importantly, when I looked through the sites pulled up in the listed top 10 references, the quality of the references were quite different.
While highly subjective, I felt that the Google search provided more relavent and authoritative(?) references in siting articles by CBS Marketwatch, Reuters, Boomberg, and ABCNews. The MSN search brought up a blog site, and various marketing feeds that merely provided a short snippet and a link to another reference. I think MSN still needs to iron out some difficulties in their page ranking methods.
To be more thorough, I looked at AskJeeves and Yahoo.com. AskJeeves brought up 854 references, mostly from sites wanting to sell me Fosamax! Yahoo pulled up a mere 811 references but, interestingly, many in the top 10 overlapped with those in the top 10 of the Google search.
Use this at your own risk, your milage may vary and past performance is no indication of future returns. For now, though, I think I’ll stick to Google.
