Live.com Search Has Serious Usability Problems

Joel Spolsky, the guru behind Joel on Software, has a straightforward and on point definition of usability:

“Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected.”

By that definition (and just about any other), the beta web search currently available off of Microsoft’s Live.com website isn’t usable....

Adventures in Image Searching

Here is the first result if you query Microsoft’s new image search engine for “bill gates“:

Here is the first result if you search Google Images for “bill gates“:

Searches were done at 5:00 pm EST on Saturday, March 18....

Wired News: Man Vs Machine in Newsreader Wars

There is a good article on Wired News about the different approaches being taken by Web 2.0 news sites like Digg and Tailrank to solve the information overload problem. With the explosion of blogs, its gotten harder to wade through the hay to find the needle. These sites attempt to find the most popular stories on the Internet at any given time,...

What Industries Have the Best/Worst Websites?

Adrants has a breakdown of the Web Marketing Association’s (WMA) Internet Standards Assessment Report, which examines which industries have the most/least effective websites. The study found that gaming, music, sports and automotive sites are the best while public relations, directory/search engine and radio sites are the worst. You can download a copy of the report from the WMA website....

Weighing in on the Conversation Index

I have been meaning to write a post on Stowe Boyd’s Conversation Index for awhile, but for whatever reason didn’t get around to it. Then late last week I read that a media monitoring firm had started using it as a metric to track the amount of conversation a blog entry generates,...