Oh, good! Slashdot recently gave us all a treat, when they posted an explanation of why their Bing search engine fails. We’re happy because the other shoe has dropped; we have our inevitable postmortem, and we can now return our attention to the one important search engine and leave the other stragglers for second-rate consideration.

Quote:

“For Microsoft, focusing on the head instead of the long tail meant that it returned queries for popular sites and failed to serve queries with smaller, lesser known resources online.”

Oooooh, yes, the long tail! In Internet marketing, the long tail has become a buzzword of mythical proportions. But in this case, it kind of sounds like a threadbare excuse. Several commenters on Slashdot have pegged it much closer to what sounds like the truth by consensus:

1. Too little, too late. Google beat everybody, and that’s all there is to it.
2. Microsoft doesn’t have enough trust in this sphere.
3. Clumsy interface. Google got simple, and nothing beats simple.
4. Microsoft doesn’t have MapReduce. That’s the secret sauce, there!
5. An out-of-touch corporate bureaucracy. The MSN team controlled the design, and rode it into the ground.

Related posts:

1. Wisdom From The Experience of a Microsoft Employee