i recently had an internal email come through on one of our distribution lists that asked who the owner of mysearchoff.com was. it wasn’t until that email came through that i realized that i completely forgot i built this thing over a year ago as an attempt to see for myself what search engine was truly providing the best results… live search vs google vs yahoo!.

because i built it in a couple days (the sql took the longest… i am just plain no good at database schemas and stored procedures), i really did not put much thought into it. that is until i saw that mail come through and the accompanying blog post.

so that made me go dig up the source code (i first had to find it… there is something to be said for source control even with just one developer) and update a few bugs and update the framework to .net framework 3.5. first i fixed the crashing in firefox 3. at the time i deployed it over a year ago, it was working in ff2 but times change and i guess so does “standards”. second, there was a z-order problem in showing the scroll bar for the yahoo! results. fixed that too.

since i spent the time to fix some of the bugs with my little engine that could, i thought i would set it as my default search provider (in ie, notice the search toolbar turn orange and allow you to add mysearchoff to your providers) to see how useful it really was. it turns out that i am using it more and more and really finding interesting results. it is extremely helpful in finding information since it basically gives me the best of three engines at once (although, nothing against you yahoo!, but i collapse your pane down most of the time). mysearchoff is now my default search provider in internet explorer and firefox.

i have had some really good feedback on what to add and would love to hear more so let me have it. also, don’t forget to click the green checkbox icon in the upper right to vote on the engine that gave you the best results (full disclaimer: i am not capturing any personal information when you vote. i am only capturing your search criteria and your vote).

 

Example search for “gorbett”:
my blog 1 on yahoo! (maybe i should stop collapsing your pane!)
my blog 2 on google (google likes me more than msft :( )
my blog 3 on live (wtf?!? show me some love msft. i work for you for pete’s sake!)