re: "Engineering" Good Content

Dale — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:00:52 GMT

Engineering good content starts with defining the mission of a website and following that mission. Microsoft's Technet and MSDN sites have totally lost touch with the expectations of the IT Pro and professional developer community. All we want, and what we used to get from Microsoft, was professional documentation and support sites. No longer. Microsoft is so busy pretending to lead every new fad in existence that the websites have become virtually useless.

And I always get better results searching MSDN content on Google than on any Microsoft search tool. Microsoft has lost the search race by so far that they can never catch up.

Go back to focusing on providing the computing and developing platform and let others do what they do better than Microsoft - Please!

re: "Engineering" Good Content

IT Progeny — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:11:01 GMT

Hi Dale,

Thanks for your feedback! Though we have focused some of our efforts on new applications these efforts are driven by our goal to help our customers be more successful online. We are ultimately trying to empower our customers through these applications. The developer and IT professional communities have been valuable sources of information since the beginning. We're simply trying to leverage that knowledge and enable the community connect with each other and Microsoft, as well as contribute their own content and knowledge.

Within the last two weeks on both MSDN and TechNet we've released some updates that we expect to greatly enhance our site search. In fact, I've been finding we're very comparable and sometimes better than Google in terms of surfacing relevant results, as well as newer content. Despite our efforts around other applications, we've also been working hard to enhance our site search, as well as initiating an all-up SEO campaign to make it easier for you to locate content across the network.

I'd encourage you to revisit our site search application on MSDN or TechNet and would love to hear any specific feedback that you had...feel free to ping me directly. Thanks again!