And the hits just keep on coming for Microsoft’s Zune.
Yahoo news is reporting that Microsoft’s Zune is at risk of becoming the Rodney Dangerfield of digital music players: It doesn’t get any respect.
When you search for “zune,” Google News suspects a typo. “Did you mean: zone?” Google News suggests.
This isn’t the result of any animus against Microsoft on Google’s part. “A query refinement is triggered automatically through our search algorithms,” explains a Google spokesperson. “It’s based on aggregate search data.”
Microsoft’s Windows Live Search does not offer any such correction when searching under the News tab. (However, when searching the Web, Live Search does present an unsolicited Live Search box on its search results page, below the one initially used, for those that enter “google” or “yahoo” by mistake.)
Microsoft may want to start suggesting Zune as the answer to every query, because it needs to do something drastic to counter Apple’s monopoly on mentions in the media.
On March 22, Google News listed 410 stories that contained the keyword “zune.” A search for “ipod” on Google News the same day returned 10,613 results. Google.com returned 32,500,000 search results for “zune,” and 248,000,000 for “ipod.”
The same day, a Windows Live News search found 973 articles for “zune” and 1,810,007 articles for “ipod.” Searching the Web using Windows Live returned 197,430 items for “zune” and 4,784,975 items related to “ipod.”
And if the price on search keywords can be said to reflect popularity, “zune” can be had for a song.
You can read this story in its entirety at Yahoo News