It looks like Microsoft is building another search engine? or perhaps revamping Live Search, not sure. But I guess we'll see.
I do have some thoughts about Live Search though and here they go. I don't think the problem with Live Search is it's algorithm or index or anything like that. I think it's the culture around it!
Those of you who read my blog would know that I've covered Live Search a lot and I like to think that I took a close look at it. IMHO, Live Search isn't lacking in features but it's lacking a lot of support! It doesn't seem to me that Live Search has had good coverage in the blog world by MS bloggers which I find a bit interesting! The other thing works at a disadvantage to Live Search is it's name! I can go and talk to some one and say I 'googled' blah blah, or they can say google this and this, but this wont work with Live Search, I cant go say I Live Searched this thing.. not easy to pronounce, same thing with yahoo, I don't feel it's very easy on the mouth!
Here are some naming suggestions (which are not really that great but I think illustrate my idea)
MS Can buy www.find.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) and name it's search Windows Live Find, then when someone is trying to search for something they can go Find it and when they do they can say, I found it ...etc
My other naming suggestion would be, Windows Live Locate, and using www.locate.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) then they can use Locate it ...etc like I say in the find example. This could help MS substitute google as a search term... hence compete with the google culture.
Microsoft, I still love your search engine but you can do better, I hope you are listening!!!!
I've been using Sauce Reader for reading all my feeds till now and I want to move on but can't decide on what to use. What is everyone using out there.
The only 2 annoying things with Sauce Reader were it's a desktop thing so cant read all my feeds from anywhere without my computer, and a few crashes every now and then, other than that, I really liked using it.
I know of several other replacements to Sauce Reader such as FeedDemon that I can try, but I was thinking of an online reader, and so far, I am not impressed with any.
Here are the ones I tried and my thoughts about them.
Live.com : Can import my opml file and read feeds there but there are 3 problems.
1) Only partial content is shown
2) Can't read comments on posts
3) to read more you have to popup a new window
BlogLines : Better than live .com but I don?t like the fact that
1) I don't like the frame set, the frame divider is far too thick
2) Again can't read comments on posts
NewsGator Online : Only tried the beta AJAX version of it. Better than the above two but
1) Seems a little bit slow
2) Again even though it does seem to have a comments section at the bottom it doesn't seem to grab any feed comments!
Google Reader : Not impressive at all, well not to me anyway, but it seems a lot of people like it out there. Problems:
1) I don't like the UI, colours are just bad, consistent with GMail colours but used the wrong way around I think.
2) Comments, comments, comments, where are they, why are ALL online readers I've tried missing comments.
Are online readers a bad idea? Is there anything better that I haven't tried out?
It looks like I might give up the whole online RSS reader thing and just stick with something like FeedDemon.
If I have to choose from the above I would go for the NewsGator one, but still it feels like the best of the worst to me.