Another IT Rant (Reposted)

I posted this last Thursday, and a short time later Blogspot went down.  When it returned, this post was gone.  Coincidence?  We'll find out.  Dear Microsoft Programmers,

Mirriam-Webster defines search in this manner:

to look into or over carefully or thoroughly in an effort to find or discover something: as a : to examine in seeking something <searched the north field> b : to look through or explore by inspecting possible places of concealment or investigating suspicious circumstances c : to read thoroughly : check; especially : to examine a public record or register for information about <search land titles> d : to examine for articles concealed on the person e : to look at as if to discover or penetrate intention or nature

In their definition, you search in order to find things.  In most instances, we search with the expectation that we would indeed find what we are looking for.  I know it is a remarkable concept.

The reason I bring this up, is you apparently have no clue as to what people expect when they do a search.  It seems to me that you need to review this definition because your search services do not seem to find what the user is looking for.

Perhaps you are attempting to use the same mind reading abilities that you build into your other products.  You know the ones.  The things in MS Word you have to turn off to get your document to look the way you want; rather than the way Word thinks you want it to look.  Like how you have to turn off the select whole words otherwise you cannot simply select the stuff you want.  That type of thing.  The things users wrestle with in your products that you think improve them.

Since Windows 98, your built in search program has become less and less useful.  It is going the wrong way!  I found it interesting that the "Advanced Search" in Windows XP was easier to use than the regular search.  Shouldn't the advanced search be harder?  Not to mention, it still found things.  You couldn't have people actually finding things, so you introduced "Search 4" for Windows XP.  At first, you automatically installed it with WindowsUpdate.  So, I had to uninstall it.

In Windows XP you had this nice feature called "Search for Computers"  I cannot tell how handy that was.  (Gone in search 4 and beyond.)  If I had difficulty connecting to a particular network share, I could see if the workstation could actually see it.  You know, by searching for that server computer.  Can't do that anymore.

I have done searches in Windows 7 for files that I knew existed, but Windows 7 could not find them.  I have done searches in Windows 7 where I manually found the file before Windows 7 did.  You see, probably 99% of the time we search for file names.  (It is probably even more than that.)  However, for some reason, your searches also search through text files to look at their contents.  Thus, on unindexed directories (like network shares) search takes forever!  While searching inside files could be handy in some circumstances, in general it just slows down the search.  That kind of thing should be put in -- oh I don't know -- an advanced search.  (Not vice-versa).

The example I have used about your inability to find when doing a search is the program TweakUI.  It is one of your powertoys for Windows XP.  It is a nice little tool to help customize the user interface of Windows XP without having to edit the registry or use the group policy editor.  We used it regularly, and it is a program by you -- Microsoft.

So, you would think you could go to download.microsoft.com and do a search for "TweakUI".  Well, naturally you can, but you won't find it.  A product, that you can download from your site, cannot be found searching your own site for it!  This is as true now as it was when XP was your flagship.  At that time, a Google search for "TweakUI" came up with a link to your site, and it was the first choice.  It is now down the list, but it is a silly situation to have to use an outside service to find files on your site. 

Simply put, Google does search better than you do.  You see, Google is the dominant search engine because when you search for things, you actually find them.  You see, there is that find thing popping up again in this whole search thing.  Do you get the picture?

You want another interesting thing?  If you go to the download page for Windows XP, TweakUI is on the page.  However, if you do not notice it among the long list of other things listed, you might feel the urge to type "TweakUI" in the search bar.  Hey!  It finds things!  Two things (as of this writing.)  That is a big improvement -- oh wait!  No.  Neither link actually takes to you to a place where you can download TweakUI.  You know the program that resides at your site!  You know the one that I was looking for!

So, Bing will never be anything useful -- to anyone -- ever -- as long as it does not come up with useful results when you use it.  The current search on your flagship operating system is far inferior to the search you had on your OS 13 years ago.  You know, things are suppose to improve over time.  At least you are supposed to improve them if you want to retain market dominance.  The thing that helps you is that Apple's finder is a misnomer.

So, please review the above definition of "search" and if you need help with the term "find" that can also be arranged.

Thanks for your attention.

Douglas.