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....

Paid Content: A $2 Billion Industry

I didn’t want to pay for premium content on The New York Times site. For most of college and graduate school, I started my day off surfing NYTimes.com website for free. So when I awoke one morning last year and was confronted by a gothic orange T guarding my weekly dose of Paul Krugman,...

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....

What’ll it Be? Lots of Visitors or Lots of Users?

As a moody consumer and cynic, I’m beginning to find that there are way too many websites that claim to be “a one stop shop” or the “complete” or “ultimate” resource for their field. In many cases, these sites are so unappealing and loaded with so much content, that users like myself are forced to seek help from other sources or forget the whole matter entirely and continue watching television,...

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,...