Google has a monopoly market share of the search business, but Microsoft hasn't given up. As expected - see below - it has rolled out a new version of Live Search today, and obviously the Microsoft press release claims lots of improvements.
The Live Search team has, like most of Microsoft, been blogging away and top of their list is:
Relevance, relevance, relevance. We've quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches. Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results.
It will take some time to figure out how good it is, but it seems much less blog-happy and less product-focused than Google, which heavily prioritises brand names. (Google Search's main aim in life now seems to be a sales catalogue. I like that.) Live also seems less spammy, though it has more prominent advertisements.
However, while Live Search is mostly a copy of Google, there are a couple of major annoyances. One is that Microsoft doesn't tell you how big a cached page is. This makes a big difference to whether I'll look at a page. (If it says 25K then I probably will; if it says 945K then I won't.) Another is that the Live Search in the top left isn't a link that takes you back to a clean home page. Why not?
On the good side, the Advanced button has survived, so I can carry on tweaking the Results Ranking directly, which Google does not allow. However, I know I am the only person in the world who does this. (I'm also one of the three people who uses Macros.)
Either way, it's nowhere near good enough to have any impact on Google. To get people to switch, you have to have a very clear advantage, preferably an order of magnitude. Even if Live Search was 100% better than Google, most people wouldn't switch, and it isn't. In fact, Live Search needs to be better than Google just to hang on to the users it's got.....
