I hope they start using it on MSDN. Until they can get their shit together with regard to search on their own properties, I don't have a lot of hope for them indexing the web.

Absolutely. There's a real culture problem at Microsoft that is hostile to search. I think its absolutely fair to say that Microsoft has treated search as an afterthought in their products, and it shows.

I recently saw Microsoft's Mike Gannotti speak about building Sharepoint portals for large organizations, and he said "if a user has to search you have failed them." The argument was that if a proper hierarchical navigation was in place a user should never have to search.

To me that's heresy, and I wasn't shy about saying so. The retort was that I saw search as a panacea, or worse as an excuse to be lazy about information architecture. Of course neither is true. I believe great IA begets great search and that both are important and worth getting right.

So I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm hoping Bing can work on both fronts, by applying taxonomy to unstructured information when it makes sense and staying out of the way the rest of the time. With the wealth of talent at Microsoft I think they are capable of building a great search engine, but only if they can really see search as more than an ad platform.

It's really unfortunate, because they have a terrible bitrot problem as well. If I try to find documentation on products older than 3 or 4 years old, at some point in the hunt for the correct documents, I'll end up at a 404 error. What makes it terrible is that I'll get that 404 from a page that I've been linked to from inside of MSDN, or from the search. I just use Google to search MSDN now, and it saves me tons of time (and frustration).

I'm excited too, mostly to see what they did with the PowerSet technology.

I like the competition but I also want Microsoft to lose.

The thing about Google is that it is a very intelligent but very minimal interface to the whole Internet itself. This thing, the whole Internet, has been expanding faster than any "portal" or other kind of "walled garden" could. I hope this continues, for the variety involved but also for the freedom - knowing that no entity (even Google) will be able to sweep the results away.

When Google is just providing access to something others can give access to as well, it keeps them somewhat honest even if they are 90% dominant. When Google or Microsoft or Wolfram or anyone both hosts content and provides the interface, it makes censorship much easier. Even Google is moving more towards doing combining hosting and search through owning Youtube but Google still looks like least likely to create a "wall garden".