Rabid Wombat |

Today I decided that since I never seem to have time to make it to the Apple store, I might just buy a case for my iPhone online. (Apparently the case for an iPhone 2G is incompatible, but that’s another story.)

So with that goal in mind, I searched for “iphone 3g case leather clip” (without quotes). I was hoping to find a leather iPhone 3G case with a belt clip. That’s pretty much what I found, but Live also decided to give me links to “Top Videos” related to my query. See below:

This makes me wonder if Live is actually just taking the word “clip” and deciding that all queries with that word will be linked to videos… But why wonder when you can test?

Luckily, when I searched for “belt clip”, Live did not think I meant anything video related. (Oddly, when I searched for “snl clip”, Live did return videos, and Google did not.)

In the end, both engines offered a bunch of good links, and related ads. Both of them served my needs, and for that, this one gets chalked up as a draw.

Still, Google seemed to know that I was in shopping mode, and Live did not.

If you’re wondering how the iPhone case story ends, I have not made a purchase as of yet. All of them I’ve seen looked pretty worthless.

…until now.

I thought it would be fair to highlight that if you were to compare Live to Google every time you search, as I do, then you would find that they often tie, rather than one set of results being clearly superior.

Example query below:

I would wager that this kind of tie is fairly common for many queries. Unfortunately for Microsoft, a tie in relevance does not convert Google users, nor increase loyalty ofcurrent users.

This one’s a draw.