Brad Goldberg manages the Live Search team at Microsoft. Here are a few things he said in a recent interview with Robert Scoble:
Search has the opportunity to get a lot better.
No kidding! Search is still a sloppy area. There’s so much headroom for innovation. I’m ready for somebody to really ratchet things up a level. Tweaking relevancy is a baby step.
Microsoft thinks they’ve converged with Google on relevance.
That’s possible. It’s pretty darn close. I’ve been using Live Search as my default in Firefox and Launchy for a month or more now and I am usually happy with the results. I can certainly show examples in which Google does better than Live, but I can also show examples when Live does better than Google. Neither is anywhere close to perfect. Far from it, actually.
Search will become a lot more task focused. There are four types of tasks:
- Looking to be entertained
- Looking to buy something
- Looking for a piece of information / reference
- Looking to navigate from one site to another
Hmmm… That sounds right to me. Is anything missing? Is socializing different from wanting to be entertained?