This is a clip from of the Australian version of the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” quiz-show. The show was broadcasted on the Channel 9 channel, who had a strong affiliation with Microsoft through their collaborative content portal, NineMSN. The host (Eddie McGuire) insists the contestants should use NineMSN search over Google search.
What follows is pure marketing gold.
Credits to Lorna Farrar and Alex Khristov for bringing to my attention.
Funny clip.
Has anyone else noticed Google is alot less accurate since they did their big update a few weeks ago?
Why would they openly admit that have someone sat on Google ready to look up the answer? It entirely defeats the object of phone a friend!
Hahaha…
That right there should be ninemsn/Live Search’s whole advertising campaign in Australia.
And JamesWeb, I was thinking the same thing. I was under the impression that was against the rules. But then, how would they regulate that? I guess they could have all the “phone-a-friend”s in little locked booths back in the studio, haha… but that seems impractical…
Yah. The host slowed them down by making an irrelevant advertisement stunt for MSN search… Pitiful, I would ban this from any advertisement for fear of embarrassment, but you know what they say “bad publicity is still publicity”.
Try the search yourself. Type “dion beebe 2003 oscar category” in Google and MSN search. The answer is “D – Cinematography”, first link on Google and msn.com. The Google page loaded up faster for me (less clutter on the page)… but that’s about the only difference.
So, clearly using Google is indeed the most efficient way to get the answer (simply because the search page comes up faster).
An interesting article on a similar topic:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/interfaces-reveal-philosophy- of-search.html
@John: The host did not slow them down. When the host was speaking, it was untimed.
Eddie being the usual dick that he is.
Maybe the problem was between the chair and the keyboard…
MSN search is slower. I stick with google
I think Windows Live Search is a lot better than Google, and equally as fast.
Google/MSN it… “Google vs MSN” that will tell you who wins. (Hopefully) You’ll get a result like this: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061103/fair-browser-review/
Couldnt understand a word of it, terrible audio.
Sorry, mate, but both search engines yielded little with “dion beebe oscar” as the search keys. Answer is too obtuse and buried.
This would be marketing gold to only those who want to put up the “facade” that Microsoft’s search is better than Google. The proof is in the numbers:
As of Nov 12, 2006 it’s 45.6% vs. 11.7. I rest my case.
What are those percentages? Are they market share? If those numbers are right I’m actually really surprised MS has close to 12%; I thought everyone used Google. In my opinion I see little difference between MS search and Google. Google is slightly faster but from a completely non technical stand point they do pretty much the same thing. I use Google out of habit though.
If those percentages are correct I’m really surprised. I would of thought Googles market-share would have been much higher, like 60-80%.
@Darcy: They don’t exactly do the same job… Try searching for this for example (and get an idea of the differences): “ibm”, “25km in miles
A few fun facts:
- “vista sucks”: 1.8M Google results vs 1.2M live.com results
- “vista rocks”: 1.9M Google vs 0.7M live.com
- “google sucks”: 3M Google vs 3.1M live.com
- “google rocks”: 8.1M Google vs 1M live.com
And there are quite a few things in Google’s hat that have no equivalent on live.com, example: http://www.google.com/trends?q=google%2Cyahoo%2Cyoutube%2Cmicrosoft&ct ab=0&geo=all&date=all