i don't understand this story - it seems to be a major non-event.
I've been using Outlook Express for a couple of years and I've never seen an upgrade during that time. I'm happy with the feature set it has now so what's the big deal?
It's not like email is changing and so won't be supported by Outlook Express any more. In many ways I'd prefer Microsoft to admit it's stable so that they won't muck with it.
It's kinda like road engineers saying "we've finished tarmac and we're not going to update it anymore. it seems stable."
I did a study in September last year ("Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search and Searchability") that examined how well the four major search engines at that time (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and AltaVista -- Froogle didn't exist) could find pages from which you could buy bestselling books. It's hard to argue that a general purpose search engine shouldn't return at least one transactional page in their top results (to fulfill transactional search). However it wouldn't be so good for a general purpose search engine to return only transactional pages.
I found that Google and MSN search performed the best (i.e. they returned a transactional page early on -- although MSN search was a bit fishy, as if they had a deal with Walmart) and that Amazon had the best coverage of all the bookstores.
But if you're just interested in looking at pretty graphs the presentation I gave based on the paper is probably of more interest (pdf) OR (powerpoint).
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i don't understand this story - it seems to be a major non-event.
I've been using Outlook Express for a couple of years and I've never seen an upgrade during that time. I'm happy with the feature set it has now so what's the big deal?
It's not like email is changing and so won't be supported by Outlook Express any more. In many ways I'd prefer Microsoft to admit it's stable so that they won't muck with it.
It's kinda like road engineers saying "we've finished tarmac and we're not going to update it anymore. it seems stable."
I did a study in September last year ("Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search and Searchability") that examined how well the four major search engines at that time (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and AltaVista -- Froogle didn't exist) could find pages from which you could buy bestselling books. It's hard to argue that a general purpose search engine shouldn't return at least one transactional page in their top results (to fulfill transactional search). However it wouldn't be so good for a general purpose search engine to return only transactional pages.
I found that Google and MSN search performed the best (i.e. they returned a transactional page early on -- although MSN search was a bit fishy, as if they had a deal with Walmart) and that Amazon had the best coverage of all the bookstores.
The paper is available here.
But if you're just interested in looking at pretty graphs the presentation I gave based on the paper is probably of more interest (pdf) OR (powerpoint).