• InfoWorld, Wednesday, April 11, 2007 10:45 AM

A year ago March, Neil Holloway, president of Microsoft's Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, boasted about how good Microsoft's search engine would become. "What we're saying is that in six months' time, we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," he said. It never happened. Holloway was later ridiculed across the blogosphere for his bold prediction.

Now that a year has passed, InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz decided to conduct a little relevancy and quality test of MSN Search. Not surprisingly, he found the software giant's results wanting in both areas, compared to Google and Yahoo. Google actually returned better quality and more results for the terms he searched for.

"Why the largest software company in the world can't do better is beyond my ken," said Schwartz, although he also found Google's results wanting, only less-so than Yahoo and Microsoft. He concluded that search has become dissatisfying. It needs improvement, because now we all suffer from a little search fatigue.

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