Well, Microsoft has launched their 'new' search engine... Here's my initial impressions.
They have missed all the lessons Google has taught us about making search SIMPLE and accessable. In fact, they have done the exact same thing in terms of bloated graphics, annoying scripts and reliance on "ain't it neat" technologies that KILLED ask.com
First load it takes forever loading some sort of background image, said image makes reading the text in the little side-bar difficult to read. Likewise the white on grey text outside their little search area is also below accessability norms in terms of contrast, the white heading texts below the image and then the menu line in the 'footer' being the worst offenders - I hope they enjoy their fines from the UK on the accessability grounds - The search box with it's akilter uneven spacing looks like a rendering error. That the results are left justified but fixed width is annoying since the width they choose is a bit too narrow.
Brand new website and the markup is malformed. This isn't the traditional validation errors you can ignore like empty alt tags, but geniune "the designer doesn't even know HTML" errors like block-level elements inside inline-level ones. This extends to the filesizes where there's 31k of markup being used to deliver 400 BYTES of content, improperly linked stylesheets, and javascript that by all indications serves no good fathomable purpose - much less the lack of graceful degredation when javascript is disabled.
It also appears that in Opera the page never finishes loading from links to files that don't even exist. Since the page is overly reliant upon javascript this means onload never fires - just brilliant. I'm seeing four different broken layouts in four different browsers...
The search results? Look like every other search engine - from fifteen years ago. Reminds me of altavista back in the day. While google has upped the ante adding the ability to white-list and black-list pages from their results, it looks like M$ has simply added tracking javascripts around all links on what is little more than a overglorified half-assed rehash of what search engines have been putting online for the better part of the past decade and a half. I think their use of (broken) scripting is supposed to help them cater the results based on what people click on - but since you don't know if the page ACTUALLY has what you want until you visit it, that's not exactly going to help tune results any.
The site is entirely typical of what I've come to expect from Microsoft so far as web technologies are concerned, which is to say it is plainly evident the people they have writing websites have no clue how to actually DO SO!!! Much like the new "live mail" this half-assed broken bloated codebase with the half-assed broken skin that doesn't even meet accessability norms should not be impressing anyone, and if anything should be resulting in people getting fired. If anything, it's an embarassment to the company of monumental proportions... but then we're talking about the company who's site for their web design tool "Web Expression" has a broken layout on Large font/120dpi systems.
Color me unimpressed.
The ONLY reason it's seeing any sort of ranking spike is launch fever - I can't see anyone finding a good reason to actually stick with it apart from joe sixpack too stupid to know anything about the internet apart from clicking on the big blue E and having it go to MSN.COM
