One day, there was a blind man sitting on the steps of a building
with a hat by his feet and a sign that read:

“I am blind, please help.”

A creative publicist was walking by and stopped to observe.
He saw that the blind man had only a few coins in his hat.
He dropped in more coins and, without asking for permission,
took the sign and rewrote it.

He returned the sign to the blind man and left.
That afternoon the publicist returned to the blind man and noticed
that his hat was full of bills and coins.

The blind man recognized his footsteps and asked
if it was he who had rewritten his sign
and wanted to know what he had written on it.

The publicist responded: “Nothing that was not true. I just wrote the
message a little differently.” He smiled and went on his way.

The new sign read: “Today is Spring and I cannot see it.”

Learning what to say changes everything.

via Kim Klaver’s blog (I first saw this on Seth Godin’s blog)

“Making Xmas with what we have now would be disastruous, moreso than being late. If you’re late, you miss a few hundred millions in sales – maybe. If the crap that I self-host now, which blinks my screen with such ferocity that my head aches, can’t find audio/nic drivers, loses windows messages and sends emails without me wanting to – if this would ship, it would cost a lot more to fix, besides showing the world we’re incompetent.”

– A Microsoft engineer comments (anonymously, of course) on the Vista debacle (via SiliconValley.com)

Not really. People like to use more than one engine to find what they’re looking for.

Google users are most loyal. Google captured 71% of all searches executed by its users in Dec ’05. Yahoo captured 48.1% of its user’s searches.

I’m sure the folks at AOL and MSN are a little concerned after having spent lots of $$ revamping their search offerings. They have much more work to do.

A9’s Share of Search Activity (SOSA):

Not surprising, Google is A9.com’s #1 threat. Interesting that A9 users submit nearly the same numbers on queries on Ask.com as they do on A9.com itself.

Bottom-line: Search engines, as they try to nurture a more loyal user base, have their work cut out for them. There is still much to do.