Live Search vs Google Search vs Yahoo Search
Want an easy way to know if Live, Yahoo, or Google search will return better quality results? There is an easy way to do this using this site: http://www.mysearchoff.com. It’s great to get simultaneous results from all three engines in a single page. I found this very useful when doing search engine optimization for keyword terms – you can figure out the ranking and see what the page looks like without doing 3x the work. Also, you can vote on what search engine results you think "wins" by clicking on the green checkbox icon in the top right and see the results of peoples' votes.
Also, another site MS employees use to compare Live Search to Google (side by side) is http://www.searchvote.com. Our internal one doesn't give any results for Yahoo and in my own opinion is not as good as the public - mysearchoff.com mainly because it has a voting/results feature and is more easy to display the results b/c you can resize the window.
Personally, I like the friendlier display output of Live Search better than Google Search (i.e. do a search on Barack Obama). Typically Google will have a larger number of results, but IMO this doesn’t matter since you don’t ever really get past the first few pages of results and the Live Search results are quality for those 1st pages the large majority of the time (and sometimes better than Google's). Try it out for yourself and see!
If you want to provide written feedback to Microsoft about Live Search, you can send it via this link: https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx?productkey=wlsearch
On a side but related note, Live Search gives you cash-based incentives to simply use their search engine (called SearchPerks!) and also cashback on products you purchase through Live Search. I'm not sure if this will help increase Live Search's ~8% market share of the search engine business, but it's certainly worth mentioning!
Update 12/12/08 - you can check out the Fall 2008 improvements made to Live Search by watching the video on Channel 10.
