Microsoft has a ways to go in search...

So I discovered an article on a Microsoft forum today where someone was asking about the differences between the different versions of enterprise search. I posted a reply, with some link suggestions and a pointer to a previous posting here on our own blog.

Now, because of all the work we do with Microsoft's FAST product, some people think we see no wrong in Redmond. Well, read on.

A few minutes later, I wanted to go back and re-read the original posting; but, try as I might, I was unable to find the posting on the Microsoft forum search. The original question had a number of relatively unique terms, so I tried again. And again. No luck anywhere on the Microsoft MSDN site.

(By the wait, it sometimes took up to 30 seconds to get a result back- something on the system social.msdn.microsoft.com takes forever. But the search itself, when it came back, reported it only took 0.2 seconds' so i felt much better. NOT. I noticed that if I hit the 'Search' button again in frustration after a long wait, the result came back immediately. Someone at Microsoft needs to be looking at this!)

I went back to the Google public site and, by using a bunch of unique terms, found the original post. My search? fs4sp fs14 fsis fsia reference. Only one document comes back even in Google, which may be a record.

The same search on the Microsoft forums returns ZERO hits - ironic since the document is posted on the Microsoft discussion forum. Bing returns a Japanese language page; and, to no surprise, Yahoo returns the same page. Both, by the way, are an HTTP error 403 page.

So it looks like Microsoft has its work cut out for it in the public-facing web search arena: If it cannot locate a posting (from April!) on its own forums, how can it hope to compete with Google?