Not like this is news to anyone in the tech world, but I’m constantly amazed at how bad Microsoft’s search engine is. I haven’t done a lot of detailed comparisons, but one ranking I’m always interested in is how well my own sites are doing. Here’s a comparison.

KEYWORD: pocket pc
SITE: Pocket PC Thoughts
Google: 5th result
Live Search: not in the top 120 results

KEYWORD: smartphone
SITE: Smartphone Thoughts
Google: 4th result
Live Search: 53rd result

KEYWORDS: digital media
SITE: Digital Media Thoughts
Google: 4th result
Live Search: not in the top 120 results

KEYWORD: zune
SITE: Zune Thoughts
Google: 17th result
Live Search: 64th result

It’s not that the results returned by Live Search are all that bad - they all seem to be fairly relevant. But the search engine seems to hate my sites and I can’t figure out why. So either Google has it all wrong, and my sites are not valuable resources in their respective categories, or Live Search has such a radically different method of ranking that my sites simply don’t matter. I’d disagree with that of course, so for now Live Search sucks in my book.

UPDATE: Well, turns out the egg is on my face. Although I never explicitly blocked the Live Search bot from scanning my sites, it seems I had an old robots.txt file on there that was stopping it from indexing the content on all my sites save Zune Thoughts. So my apologies to the Live Search team. I’ve now deleted the robots.txt files off my sites, so come back and visit me Mr. Live Search Bot!