Andy Oakley

Working in a heavily research backed environment is one of the things I really enjoy about my job. Experimentation and measurement are central components to making progress in any ‘hard problem’ type of area and with that comes both delight and disappointment. It demands a certain persistence to continue to try new ideas when seemingly promising ones fall through but the pay-off follows eventually. For me, that reward is actually making something better, getting it production ready, and see its impact take hold in the wild.

I love shipping things.

(this post was inspired by the the most delightful xkcd)

A couple of my favorite reads right now are the Harvard Business Review Voices and Felix Salmon. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt in Seattle earlier this week, and their NY Times blog Freakonomics is always entertaining.

On the tech front, TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb are good for general news. SearchCap from Search Engine Land has a good daily summary of the goings-on in the search world.

I wish I had more time to spend on fun things like Photoshop Tutorials at psdtuts, The Big Picture and a bunch of other photography and PS blogs, but sadly they barely get read.

News mostly comes from Twitter these days which is both focused (good) and myopic (bad) at the same time. It helps having a job that makes me sensitive to large scale trends around breaking events.

A little fiction would be nice soperhaps that’s something for the holidays.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, starting today it’s time to Bing & decide. Tour Bing.

Time to shake things up a little bit. Just taking a look at how many searches are left unsatisfied (industry-wide), no one has solved this problem yet. Let’s see if we can do something about that.

One has to take all of these numbers with a grain of salt, but still…

MSN/Live Only Major Search Engine with Higher Volume in June

No matter what the pundits say, the new Microsoft Cashback program along with some continued efforts on other marketing programs such as Club Live seem to have worked in June. MSN/Live search was the only major engine in June to post higher volumes of search queries. Everyone else, including the big dog Google (GOOG), saw a decline. This seems even more impressive when you put this in the context of the overall search market. Overall search query volume in the market declined nearly 5% m-o-m, from 9.6 billion in May to 9.1 billion in June.