Steve Ballmer’s MVP Live Search Challenge

At the last MVP Summit Steve Ballmer said “I’m going to ask you one week switch your default [search engine], one week. At the end of the week…I’ll want feedback, how was your week, what happened, what did you like, what didn’t you like … Can I make that deal with you? (Cheers and applause.) That’s the deal.”

Well the week was last week, and how did I find Live Search?

I have to say it is vastly improved, in the past I just assumed Live Search would find nothing of use, especially if I was after something I would expect to find on a Microsoft site like TechNet.

This week I have found that though it does not return exactly the same a Google, it is just as useful; in fact the two are fairly complimentary. For most searches it does not now seem to matter which one I used, but when really digging one might turn up something the other does not.

So am I going to move back to Goggle? Well I am just not sure it matters for day to day searching. I certainly don’t now feel the need to change my default search engine to Google immediately when I setup a PC as I used to.