Microsoft Live Search – You almost have me (Proximity Searching?)
As per request from Steve Ballmer, to all MVP’s for the past two years, I have been attempting to switch my life over to Microsoft’s Live Search (and services). The breadth and depth of what Live has to offer is rapidly increasing and I'm really starting to recognize the value in the vision coming out of the Live team. Take for example their mapping service - IMHO Live.com maps are superior in usability and quality over any other free Map provider.
This post is not intended to get you to switch, but more to voice my opinion about the biggest lacking feature to come from Live Search.... Proximity Searching
I can honestly say that 99% of the time when searching for a person, business, etc.. I leverage Google's "near:XXX" search syntax. This would probably constitute over 80% of my non-technical related queries - a significant amount per day.
For example:
Google:
Restaurant near:v5l 4h4 (lists all restaurants, near my house - even a map)
vs
Live:
Restaurant loc:v5l 4h4 (Empty search results!)
After consulting the search.live.com documentation I find:|
loc: or location: |
Returns webpages from a specific country or region. Specify the country or region code directly after the loc: keyword. To focus on two or more languages, use a logical OR to group the languages. |
To see webpages about sculpture from the U.S. or Great Britain, type sculpture (loc:US OR loc:GB). For a list of language codes that you can use with Live Search, see Country, region, and language codes. |
As you can quickly determine on your own, having it based at the Country/Region/Language is very inadequate, not to mention having to memorize the specific Country/Region/Language code of the given location you need to search for. Ouch!
So my previous example I would be limited to:
Restaurant loc:CA (lists all restaurants, in Canada)
--Extremely inadequate for any sort of proximity searching that matters.
My hope is that this is on the near-term road map for the team. If so, I would never need to feed the Google marketing engine again (and yes, that IS a good thing!).