Microsoft insists its search results are as good as Google’s

The man in charge of Microsoft’s Live Search says the service would perform well against rivals in a blind-search test. And he argues that Microsoft is much better placed to be develop new ideas than Google.

Mike Nichols made the comments in an interview with the Washington Post. Though it doesn’t quote him directly on the point, it reports that Nichols “insists that a typical user no longer notices a difference in the results generated by a Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search.”

According to Nichols, Microsoft has reached this stage by concentrating on the basics of producing quality results, but at the expense of creating a recognizable brand: “You need to make people aware of why that product is worthy of their trial. And we haven’t done a good job of making people aware of why they should try it.”

He also says Microsoft studies show the majority of internet users will use more than one search engine during any given week. And he says Microsoft’s poor market share has its upside as there’s less revenue at risk by trying out new ideas such as the categorized results in the Kumo search project.

For what it’s worth, in an extremely unscientific test that consisted of searching for information about myself in a professional capacity plus some of my specific writings, I found Google offered slightly fewer relevant results on its first page of listings than Microsoft, but did a better job of putting them in what I considered the right order of relevance. Yahoo actually had a greater number of somewhat-relevant results than its rivals, but missed what I’d consider the most important pages and even managed a completely irrelevant result as its top listing.

But even if the results were identical, I’d probably visit Google because I know it will do a decent job without any fuss. With Microsoft I had to think what the right page was (msn.com? Live.com? Live.search.com? Search.live.com?), and with both it and Microsoft I was distracted by the other content on the portal sites.

Nichols may well be right that if I repeatedly tried Microsoft’s search facility I’d find it just as useful, but he’s also right about branding: to most people, when you think search, you think Google. But that’s less to do with marketing (when did you last see an advert for Google? ) and more to do with the firm earning a reputation for a product that, well, works. Simply offering a search service which is as good as Google is no longer a viable prospect: the only way to take market share at this stage would be to produce a search engine which was consistently better by a significant and noticeably margin.

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