Kirb’s Musings

Kirby Witmer’s ponderings, ruminations, and meditations of… anything.

This picture is pretty impressive in my opinion.

-via the Windows Live Local Blog

I used to think that Microsoft’s search engine, live.com would index my posts quicker than Google would. Now check this screenshot out.

Notice that Google says how long ago the website was updated. Sweet. Now I’m not sure which search engine is quicker. I wonder if there would be a easy way to accurately test how fast a search engine indexes a new post.

What!? I just noticed this ad for live.com.

Sam Sethi over at Vecosys wrote a very interesting post today about some of his frustrations with Google products.

Lately I have been pondering whether to unsubscribe from Google’s products myself. Last year I wrote about why I was switching over to Google from Microsoft and now 6 months later it seems I am heading back to [some of] Microsoft’s products……..
……Maybe if Google’s engineers stopped wasting their 20% time on projects like Google Transit, Mars, Ride Finder etc. and focused on making their products more feature rich and functional then it would help all of us.

I agree. Cheese on the Moon isn’t very useful.

I knew for some time that if you entered a phone number into Google, it would display a name and address but I just discovered that you don’t need to know their phone number to find their address. Here is what Google’s Help says:

To find listings for a US residence, type any of the following combinations into the Google search box:

• first name (or first initial), last name, city (state is optional)
• first name (or first initial), last name, state
• first name (or first initial), last name, area code
• first name (or first initial), last name, zip code
• phone number, including area code
• last name, city, state
• last name, zip code

That’s just awesome! On a side note, Microsoft’s Live Local has a similar feature.

I’ve been thinking that MSN/Live indexes my pages faster than Google does. And no wonder, check out this screenshot.

The live.com blog is reporting that you can now add a live.com search box to your website. It displays the search results in a floating window right on your page. Looks like the live.com team did a good job in designing it. It’s very attractive, and works in firefox too. ;) You can see a demo at Search Engine Watch. 

I was getting excited about this new Microsoft Max product. I even downloaded it, and was quite impressed. However, this morning I noticed a blog posting in Google Reader that reads…

Thank you for participating in the beta of Microsoft Codename Max. Over the next week, we will be shutting down the Max services…..

Ahhhh…. come on. I thought Microsoft was finally getting it. But wait, there’s a little bit of a clue that this project will reappear as a Microsoft Live product.

If you’re interested in seeing where we go with these ideas, keep your eye on Windows Live. We look forward to delighting you in the future!

Sweet.

The Windows Live Local Camera has captured a NWA Flight cruising around, says the Windows Live Local Blog. Sweet. That’s one awesome image.

Windows Live Local Blog writes:

It was decided to deploy the fleet of Microsoft Blackhawks to capture the highest resolution imagery possible of all of MSN’s competitor’s headquarters and monitor them 24/7. While we were at it, we photographed each location from 4 different angles allowing us to rotate our view to monitor them from North, South, East and West. The first intel from our recon is in, and it has been revealed that no one actually works at the Googleplex given the barren parking lots.

You gotta love their humor.