Search Alive Again

My apologies for the search outage. Just when I was about to send a bug report via the MSN Search blog, I noticed everything was back to normal. Ironically, their blog is quiet on this matter, as if nothing happened. Or, perhaps, so few people use their SOAP web service that nobody gave much damn. Go figure.

I thought you’d get a kick out of this story. I called the Microsoft Tech Support. They had no idea about the web service, and offered to connect me with the MSN Support. Sure. Except that MSN Support had no clue about MSN Search. See, MSN Support deals with residential DSL service and such. Developers are not their domain.

Which leads me to believe there’s no tech support for MSN Search itself. And never mind the developer side of it—nobody has any clue.

I take it back. You can email MSN Search, but then you get involved in an inbox chase, and that leads nowhere. In my submission I described exactly where the problem was and how to reproduce it, yet they sent me a scripted email asking for a URL to the page where it happened and a detailed explanation. Why do I have to repeat myself?

*Sigh*