It hasn’t taken off because I don’t think the presentation works or is that useful. Because it’s had no attention? Sure, it’s had attention. Compare this to those earlier screenshots of Google, AltaVista and Microsoft.
![windows 7 search sucks windows 7 search sucks](https://www.technipages.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/Win7-prefetch-registry-setting-1280x720.png)
Got Flash? Get your results in some strange mobile-phone looking console. There’s information there, but it’s not clear and not necessarily that helpful. Cool! Except I have no idea what all the lines mean, at first glance. It’s slower than doing a regular search, the clustering isn’t perfect and frankly, I think most people don’t find it that useful.ĭo a search, get your pages with little lines between them. Well, you can - but that never proved so useful. It’s also been around for a few years, and initially promised we’d fly through our results. And it’s never caught on (for web search), for whatever reason. Do a search, then narrow in on what you are looking for as the technology automatically organizes the results into categories, topics, tags. That image above is Clusty today, a service that’s been out for a year or two at this point, and a concept that owner Vivisimo has been doing for even longer than that. I just know other attempts don’t catch on. Whether it’s is because it is the best solution or because it is something they’ve learned to expect, I don’t know. For whatever reason, users seemed locked into what I call the “DOS Of Search” interface, where you do a search and get back those standard results in a list. Refine was a way to insert choices more directly into search results. You see, no one really played with that oh-so-cool looking way AltaVista LiveTopics meant for you to explore a topic before getting results. That image (gathered from here) was how LiveTopics transformed into AltaVista Refine. But six months later, it turned into this: Years ago, LiveTopics got a ton of buzz about how it would be the next big thing in search.
![windows 7 search sucks windows 7 search sucks](https://m.horje.com/store/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/prey-windows-screenshot-01-768x371.png)
That image (I gathered it from here) is an example of AltaVista LiveTopics in 1997. What else could we have? When I started my presentation, I joked I was a man beaten down by 10 years of promises about how cool and wonderful search results were going to be, how we’d fly through things and so on. But the presentation is still basically the same - a bunch of links. Honestly, they might as well be the same.
WINDOWS 7 SEARCH SUCKS WINDOWS
The bottom, results from Microsoft’s Windows Live Search today. In the top, the search results from Microsoft’s MSN Search in 1998.
![windows 7 search sucks windows 7 search sucks](https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/07/iTunes-Windows.png)
At the bottom, the end result of millions of dollars worth of efforts by Microsoft to give us the latest and greatest in search - a box that would be about the same if I put either a Google or AltaVista logo over it. AltaVista’s not that different from Google, with tabs in 2003 and then links in 2006 replacing the drop-down box. In this slide, I focus on the core of each page, the search boxes. Nearly ten years, and it’s still a case of here’s a search box, push submit and away you go. Drop AltaVista’s banner and graphical logo, and the home page might as well be Google. Sorry I can’t delve even deeper into a fully-fleshed out article, but I’m short of time for that, at the moment! In case you’re interested, here’s what I was showing with some limited commentary about what I said. I mainly focused on a bunch of screenshots on things people have tried with search over time. I didn’t provide a super formal presentation, since I’d turned up not really expecting to do anything at all. Instead, we ended up talking generally about a variety of search issues - some trends, some particular search engines and so on. We actually didn’t have a lot of discussion in the end about how search could or would change, nor was the session of 15 or so people meeting the stereotype above.
WINDOWS 7 SEARCH SUCKS PLUS
As part of that, I did a session called “Why Search Sucks & You Won’t Fix It The Way You Think.” Figuring my audience was likely filled with AJAX-happy, the-community-is-all-love-and-good tech types, I was deliberately trying to spark some discussion plus provide a reality check. I took part in Euro Foo Camp 2006 this past weekend.