Vista IE7 hang(s) -- NOT!
I just finished reading Ed Bott's piece Vista scare stories distort the real picture which encapsulates shortcomings on another of our colleagues articles (Marc Orchant's Vista IE7 issue remains unsolved for many users). Much to my surprise, both of my colleagues missed the point!
Both authors went to Google and searched on Vista IE7 hangand/or Vista IE7 hangs and both got hundreds of thousands of hits as evidence of the magnitude of problems with Microsoft's latest operating system. Ed Bott when so far as to replace the term IE7 first with FireFox and got over 800,000 hits. Then Ed replaced Vista IE7 with Safari then Ubuntu then Tivo -- each time getting over 1,000,000 hits!
What's most amusing about this exercise in pointing out how meaningless the number of hits that a Google search produces is that both of my fine colleagues missed the real point of this exercise:
When search engines are presented with a string of words separated by spaces but not enclosed in quotes, each word is searched for independently of the others.
Searching for Vista IE7 hang results in all articles containing some combination of those words. So? I just went to Google and searched for the entire string "Vista IE7 hang" and I turned up only ONE result:
» Vista scare stories distort the real picture | Ed Bott’s ...
Using the broader search chosen by Ed and Marc certainly does turn up its share of reports about problems with IE7 running under Vista but I have fiddled around with Google long enough to know that it often produces many, many duplicate links to the same place. It also produces links to forums where the same issue has been discussed repeatedly or where all three terms show up but independent of each other and in different contexts. For instance, see this link produced by a Google search of Vista IE7 hang --
Notice that this CNET TalkBack is entitled "Microsoft puts end to Windows 98 Support".
Enough said.