Microsoft LIVE is dead…wrong

In an attempt to take business away from other companies like Google, Yahoo, and Mapquest, Microsoft has introduced us to LIVE at http://www.live.com.

LIVE is Microsoft’s attempt to gve us Web Search, Maps, Image search, and something called QnA, which I have no clue what they really expect from this.

So, I thought I would give it a try. I needed to find the closest BART station to an address. In GOOGLE Maps, I would type “BART near 3153 17th Street, San Francisco CA” and I would see a map with several pins in it. One, in green is the address mentioned. The red pins are close by BART stations. The one close by was 16th & Mission in San Francisco, about 3 blocks away.

So I tried this same search in LIVE. On a very complex screen that followed after pressing MAP, I received, on the left edge a statement that said “No results were found. Are you looking for the location of BART near 3153 17th Street, San Francisco CA?” The last part of the statement was a hot link.

What the hell does this question mean? Of course that is what I was looking for, which is why I typed it into the search box in the map page, obviously. On the right side of the screen was a map, and two red pins were in the map. The results listed next to the map for the pins were:
1). A BART station in Oakland on 19th street. Well, that is 12 miles away and in a different city across a large body of water.
2). 333 Bush Street. I have no idea why this was chosen.

There were also a number of green markers all stacked on top of themselves. The zoom level of the map showed the entire San Francisco Bay Area., so the area of interest stacked all the pins on top of each other. (In Google, the zoom level is of the area around the requested address.) I zoomed in about EIGHT times to see what they had the green pins on. I was given 10 locations, like the SF AIDS foundation and other misc, non-related locations. Why, I have no idea. Nothing pointed to the address requested, and nothing pointed to BART.

Needless to say, the MAP function did not work too well and required a LOT of tweaking and playing to see what I wanted.

Random address searches worked poorly or not at all. My home address returned no such place. Same for my work address. It was not until I realized that I had to push a small link that was defaulted to “Business” rather than “Maps” on the Map page to get a map. Who would have guessed? Selecting “Maps” solved the failure to resolve addresses, but this was not so obvious. The pin it placed on the map for my house was about a block off. So was my work location. A move pin function allowed me to put them in the right place, but I wonder if it updated the database? I suspect not. And why default to “business” when it was “map” that I clicked on in the first place? Oh, never mind, it is Microsoft software, why ask why? SIGH!

Other map functions I could not get to work at all. There are links for directions, traffic, etc, and clicking them did NOTHING! It is also worth noting at this point, like many web sites, it is heavy in Java, which means it may not work well on all platforms and with all browsers. Maybe it is incompatible with Mac Java (which I would not put past Microsoft) or a non-IE browser, because a lot of links and functions simply did not work at all. But if they want people to use it, it needs to work on ALL platforms well, and it appears it does not.

To further hit this point home, it claims to offer “3D maps”, but pressing that button revealed a pop-up that said:
“To use this feature, open Live Local Search in Windows Internet Explorer version 6 or 7. For more information, and to download the latest version, visit the Microsoft Internet Explorer website.” Well, there you go, no Macintosh support! Thank you Microsoft for once again leaving Mac users behind. Could this explain why Google is doing so well where you are not in this area? Think about it.

Virtual Earth, a picture view of the address mapped, much like Google Maps Satellite view, had some great views of San Francisco, and excellent pictures of my house (well, neighborhood, where I found my house) and in many cases were much better than Google’s pictures, but I did not search a big enough number of places to know if it was good everywhere.

On Web Search, LIVE did not do too badly. Several search terms worked as well in LIVE as they did in Google. I was not impressed by the image search however.

Navigation is also strange. To get to the basic MAPs page, for example, you must enter something (or leave it blank), usually an address on the main page, select MAPS, and then hit the search button. This then loads maps, which, even on my 6 Gbps cable modem took 15 seconds. I did not see a way to get directly into the maps.

As for QnA, well, this is an Ask Geeves like thing where you ask questions and LIVE gives you, yes, you guessed it, Live people answers. Unfortunately, to use QnA, I had to create an account and sign up, and given the quality of the rest of this service, and the large array of other choices for info, I will pass. Let me know if you use this and what you think.

Right now, I think I will put LIVE right next to the ZUNE player I do not want either. I am sure Microsoft will improve this over time (I hope), but right now, I will stick with Google and Ask.com, and leave LIVE for another time.