Trivial Pursuit is exactly that

Michael Liedtke of the AP has posted a review comparing the performance of major search engines on a randomly selected set of Trivial Pursuit questions. I'm all about getting the right answer to the top of the page every time, but think for a second about the words "Trivial Pursuit". Those questions aren't chosen because they're likely to be things people want to know, they're chosen because they're likely to be things that people don't know.

A real way to do this review would be to find a way to sample the questions that people actually want to answer with search engines, and compare Yahoo, Google, MSN, et al on that set.

No upside for talking to reporters

Fellow Googler Joe Beda has a great post detailing why there's no upside in talking to reporters. He might be taking the right idea a little too far, but it's definitely the right idea to start with -- when you blog, your message gets out to the world, unfiltered. Reporters, intentionally or not, can twist your words around.

James Fallows, throw me a bone

The Times published a rant by James Fallows about question answering vs. keyword search. Google Q&A isn't yet at the level of question answering he describes ("tell me the per capita spending on education in California over the last 50 years"), but he also goes the entire column without mentioning Google Q&A.
For the record, Google Q&A has been live for over two months, and it's a lot more like question answering than vivisimo's result clustering...

My kingdom for a decent personal finance app

About six months ago, my wife and I made the big switch to a mac. Great! No more spyware! When I don't know how to navigate the GUI, I can drop into the CLI and fix things there! The switch was nearly a complete success.

Until we switched from MS Money to Quicken Mac.

I soon learned that this app is almost universally reviled, for good reason. Trying to describe the ways in which it is broken would take hours. At the root, the problem is that the interface is just a series of co-existing application windows with no defined interaction. Trying to find the right window for a given task requires examing all the windows, and when you get there, you find that the transaction you want to work with hasn't made it to that window yet.

I've looked into some of the alternatives like MoneyDance, but nothing is all that appealing -- especially given the overhead of transitioning among data file formats. My best bet at this point might be to start running MS Money on Virtual PC, thereby undoing much of the benefit of the switch.

None of which is to say that that Intuit appears to have noticed. In all the forums with rants and raves against Intuit, there's no indication that they've tried to address any of it. One might think they'd at least want to address the fray on the amazon comments page, but they haven't bothered yet.

I have tried unsuccessfully to track down the email address for the product manager for Quicken Mac at Intuit (I think the culprit is Adam Samuels). If you have it, please leave a comment. Someone needs to make his life painful enough that something starts to change.

Intro

I'm Jonathan Betz. I work at Google; I'm the tech lead for our
question answering service (aka "Google Q&A"). Read my blog or don't read my blog, it's up to you. You're not going to get the scoop on the next great Google product, but you might get some insight into life at a great software company, and you'll definitely get an earful of my ideas about modern software development.