I have been a Google junkie for some years - never venturing too far from that familiar blue page. But, I was setting up a friends PC and I wanted to install the free version of AVG anti virus software. I had the default Windows XP with the default Windows browser that defaults to Microsoft’s Live Search. OK - being lazy I just went straight to the search window and typed “AVG”. This is what I got:

The first link is from an AVG reseller, some download sites, and coming in at no. 5 is a link to the part of the AVG web site that I was not looking for - one that only shows the paid-for version of AVG. So after clicking fruitlessly for a couple of minutes I did the same search in Google:

Immediately, links no. 1 and 2 were exactly what I was looking for. I am not going back to Live search again.

With 80 million users around the world continually searching for the free version of AVG, it should be possible for a serious search engine to work out that “AVG” would mean the AVG home page or to their free software. Live.com got my search amazingly wrong. So what has Microsoft poured their billions into? A search engine that cannot see the blindingly obvious?

One can think so and that would be bad enough but when you can compare instantly Live Search results with the competition it looks worse.  In Live Search the official AVG site is buried somewhere towards the bottom of the page. The link to the free version of AVG - nowhere. Worse, look again at the sponsored links… “AVG.0fficial-Web.com” and “www.Avast-Clean.com” sites that subtly look like the official AVG and Avast web sites but are not. When you compare this to Google and Yahoo’s search results it makes Microsoft look like their Live Searches are not fair but pushing you towards sponsored links.

This maybe excusable five years ago but results like this leave a bad taste in users mouths. It makes you feel Live.com is a cheap advertising operation and not the work of a Fortune 500 company.