You might not have noticed that MSN just gave its search portal a makeover. All very clean, crisp and Googlesque. All very much crap. The comedy comes the moment you click on “View Source.”
Mike Davidson has a rant about this little abomination. (Summary: if HTML is Javascript, then English is C++.)
Suffice to say that if it’s going to say anything, that tag should look something like this:
It gets better. Every single stand-alone tag (meta tags, img tags, etc.) is closed, per xhtml specifications. Except that there is no doctype declaration or anything else that suggests to the browser or anyone viewing the source that this is supposed to be xhtml. All those closing slashes are meaningless.
Notice the borked image at the bottom? Here’s what my poor browser is trying to find:
These clowns are clearly not capable of coding even the most basic html. Humorously, their concept of “streamlined code” seems to be to put it all on one unreadable line. It’s only a small page, but I wouldn’t want to be the one who gets to debug it.
An empirical test of the actual search engine also finds Microsoft lacking. A vanity search at Google unsurprisingly lists this site first. Yet the same search at MSN for some reason lists two and a half pages of blogs that I’ve commented on at one time or another before listing the site that’s most relevant to the search near the bottom of page 3. Go figure.
As Andrew McGuckin put it when we were talking about this yesterday, “if [this is] what it takes, we are all experts if we just want to be.”
I vanity searched it yesterday and found some things I’d never seen on Google. A bed and breakfast? Some towns named Eliot? Wow, that’s new. Probably more relevant than myself, but still… At least T.S. Eliot ranks up there. He deserves it.
Ok, but now I just did the same search again… but it is different. The bed and breakfast is on the side as a “sponsored sites” that looks terribly familiar. Why are search engines just copying greatness? Why not try for the next level?
you need to do something interesting with thelimeybrit.com. It’s pretty darn boring at the moment.
Microsoft sucks, so what’s new?