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Brian Grainger

After Microsoft's failure to buy Yahoo they are beefing up Microsoft Live Search in their attempt to challenge Google.

Brad Goldberg, General Manager for search engine business, said that 'search' is a critical area for Microsoft.

Live Search now provides mapping information and location based services via mobile devices.

Microsoft also said that it had improved the way images were presented when the 'image find' facility is used. They would appear on a single page to avoid users having to click 'next page'.

This latter innovation (?) suggests either Live Search for images does not find many images or that there is one humungus page which will take forever to render. Maybe I'm just a cynic. I think I'll stick with Google thanks!

An advert from Oracle had me chuckling this week. The following mimics the fonts used in the ad (as best as I can in HTML).

Throw Away^*

Encouraging people to throw away half their disk drives is not exactly a green initiative, was my first thought. Oracle seemed to have shot themselves in the foot.

In the small print we see:

Yeh! That's why the encouragement is in the small print and 'Throw Away' wasn't.

Also, the Oracle banner in the ad was in green, rather than the usual red.

It makes you want to vomit how every company is trying to outdo each other in being green. I prefer honesty. The only green they are really interested in is greenbacks!

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