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How Objective Is Microsoft's Search?
bot writes "There have been a number of stories on Microsoft trying to do a 'Netscape' on Google.. what would a world in which Microsoft provides search look like? A search for 'linux' on msn.com give amazon and ebay as the top two results, and a microsoft site promoting migration from Linux to Windows as the fourth listing. A search on MSN India is even more amusing -- the top result is a dead link, and the second one is Linuxsucks.com."
And finally:
Just because you have a spine and refuse to do business with Microsoft and/or the mob, doesn't make you a "zealot".
I and others mentioned this awhile back in the article about MS trying to overtake Google. In all honesty, this may just be a flaw in their search algorithm. It's obvious that they're accepting payola for rankings, so if their algorithm looks like:
1. Return results on top payer (Amazon?)
2. Return results on other payers (Ebay, etc)
3. Return results from a search of Microsoft's site
4. Return the reults from a search of the internet
Then linux isn't singled out. Of course we can speculate all we want to, since this is Slashdot and everything is a conspiracy. In all honesty it looks fishy, but if my above theory about their algorithm is true it makes perfect sense. Sorry MS, but if you want to replace Google on the internet, you need to be OBJECTIVE. Right now you're just another search engone, and a crappy one at that.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Everybody knows that the 1.0 release of every Microsoft product sucks. But for the markets they want to take over, they are often able to squash the competition by v. 3.0 or 4.0.
Google's obviously done a fantastic job so far in the search world. But then, Netscape did a fantastic job with Navigator until it turned into Communicator bloatware. Then Microsoft came out with a 4.0 release that ate Netscape's lunch.
Google clearly has the brains to fight, but do they have the resources to remain the #1 engine, now that The Dark Lord has decided he wants that particular crown?
In any case, MS often has the last laugh over people who ridicule their 1.0 releases.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Linuxiso.org is a featured site. We even get a little MS butterfly.C HECKED&FORM= MSNH&v=1&q=linuxiso
http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=
No definititve information, but oddly enough the DNS technical contact is based out of Washington. Coincidence?...
Registrant:
Sucks, Linux (LINUXSUCKS2-DOM)
LinuxSucks
1 my way
my way, TN 43365
US
Domain Name: LINUXSUCKS.COM
Administrative Contact:
Sucks, Linux (KG4621) linux__sucks@HOTMAIL.COM
LinuxSucks
1 my way
my way, TN 43365
US
(221) 261-3088 fax: (914) 296-1088
Technical Contact:
Go2Net, Inc. (DA3706-ORG) dns-admin@HYPERMART.NET
Go2Net, Inc.
999 Third Ave, Ste 4700
Seattle, WA 98104
US
206.447.1595F fax: - - - - - 206.447.1625
Record expires on 08-Oct-2003.
Record created on 09-Oct-2002.
Database last updated on 24-Aug-2003 16:51:07 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.HYPERMART.NET 66.150.0.50
NS2.HYPERMART.NET 206.29.192.47
All your base are belong to us!
I'm not sure. If you search for "FreeBSD" or "NetBSD" you get the top (and correct) link labelled as a "featured site". Somehow I doubt they paid MSN to place their search results. (With OpenBSD the top link gets labelled a "web directory site".)
If you search Google for Linux you will find something useful: SuSE, debian, RedHat, etc. Everything a new Linux user needs.
Provincial Linux are exactly that: Provincial and useless for 99.9% of users who don't happen to live in that area.
Even more support to the claim that Microsoft is tainting the search results.
I don't know what algorithm MSN uses to search it's results, but I can hardly think of any that would put provincial organizations on top and worldwide Linux distributors to the bottom - unless MS has some penalties for suse.com, debian.org, etc.
Look this 'google' seach in msn search. You will notice that below 'google' as first entry, is MSN Search...
Another interesing thing: A frind of mine tell me that the word 'Linux' doesn't exists in Encarta 2003 DVD :-D When you search for 'linux', it shows 2 non-related topics
And.. will you trust in a 'Microsoft Wallet'? :-D
drmad
There have been a couple attempts at it, and there are a few currently in development. The problem is, a search engine in an expensive thing to run. You need tons of processing power, storage space, and bandwidth. These things are not free, nor are they cheap. (well, maybe storage space is)
You'd also need to pay engineers to maintain it. It would be a full time job for several people, and you're not gonna get people doing THAT for free.
I think google does a pretty good job of balancing commercialism with a very functional fast search engine. I see no need for anything else right now.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
msn: 542hits
google: 60,900,000 hits
now i know getting that many results is not really helpful but at least it shows there was an actual search. that combined with the fact that the first 20 results on msn were just ads...well its m$ nuff said
Wow... inaccuracies in an article on Slashdot that make MS look worse than it actually is?
If an MS article was posted WITHOUT an anti-Microsoft slant I'd probably start running through the streets for fear that the apocalypse is coming.
Here's what happened, plain and simple. People are so eager to find something against Microsoft that they turned into typical "users" and didn't read. Now instead of admitting their typical "user" mistake of not READING they're trying to justify it by saying "most users will be fooled into thinking the ads were real results." Wait, you're telling me that a business is trying to get stupid people to click on ads through a little deception? Wtf is this world coming to. If you can't trust a business to not mislead you with ads, who can you trust?
And do a search on google for the letter "s" (which I do accidentally all the time since I occasionally mess up using firebirds keyword search) and see what comes up on top.
Latest News: microsoft
It cuts both ways :)
I don't usually participate in organized Microsoft-bashing, but does anyone else get the impression that MSN Web Products team is a quiet saboteur, that tries to produce extremely unusable products? Perhaps your experience is more successful. While generally used to Microsoft office products and having Win 2k as OS of choice on my home machine, I abhor MSN products and try to avoid them whenever I can.
Passport. I use Passport to log on to a bunch of sites, and since I registered for it, I generally choose the Passport log in on such sites as uBid.com and others which provide an option. Passport itself has some issues with recognizing cookies on my machine.
When I go to a site, even Microsoft-owned MSDN site, the Sign In icon in there, but after a click it doesn't sign me in, which is quite annoying, since you get no error messages, and nothing to tell you that you haven't been successfully signed on. You have to choose Sign Out, then go back to Sign In, then repeat this procedure in case the passport cookie still doesn't work. Usability my ass.
Another interesting tidbit of information - Microsoft requires an @msn.com or @hotmail.com for Passport log-in, which is fine, they need you to authenticate on their server to prove the Passport identity. For those of us who are not MSN subscribers for dial-up or broadband, @hotmail.com is the only option. Which is fine as well - I went to hotmail.com, registered an account, never used it, except for logging in to Passport. Except one thing - your account with Hotmail expires if you don't use it for 90 days. Well, I am not using it at all, I just an address to sign-on to Passport, and every once in a while (every 3 months, as you can guess), there's that happy horseshit with (1) signing on to a Passport site, (2) getting a message your e-mail is not validf, (3) re-activating your Hotmail account, which you don't use and never plan to use, (4) signing in to Passport getting perhaps an error or two about insuccessful logons.
MSN Messenger 6. Pretty interface, colorful pictures, what more can a regular Joe User want for communicating with a friend on the other side of the country? For us, techies, it's SIP support and excellent ability for MSN Messenger to bypass firewalls and corporate security stuff.
However, with that many pretty buttons telling you to check the stock valuation, current weather and news, one cannot resist doing exactly that. However, all of it seems to be broken for me, I get some weird stocks, some weird weather and some unrelated news, even though I am subscribed with the passport ID that should be recognized by MoneyCentral, MSNBC and others in MSN network. Somehow the first time I sign in to Yahoo Messenger, everything there is just right, maybe it's just me not being able to figure out how to customize the settings for Messenger.
MSN.com Everyone that left that URL as starting page for IE after going through an install, raise your hand. [..sound of crickets..] Yeah, that's what I thought. Just ads, nothing useful, maybe an occasional MSNBC article headline that might be interesting.
Ok, rant is over, but it's really no wonder MSN is a money-losing operation. Always has been and probably will be for a while.
It's pretty obvious that the results on MSN are biased. Do a search for open source on MSN. You get back a bunch of results that don't really apply. That is, except for the first result, which is an article on Infoworld about how SCO is hurting the open source movement. Now do the same search on Google--the results are _much_ more appropriate.
The first pick is the FBSD project home.
I guess they dont see *bsd as much of a threat, today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh come on now, be fair to poor Miss Coney. A search for "infospace microsoft" reveals that not only have Microsoft done a case study on them, but the two companies also partnered in digital TV trials, and a former Microsoft "technology veteran" has joined them as their CTO.
That's just looking at the first page Google gave me. I haven't even bothered doing any more research. It's pretty clear they, uh, think along the same lines.
Now can you jump to "Microsoft is sponsoring linuxsucks.com" from that? No. But I expect the guys at infospace are pretty similar to the guys at Microsoft, you don't have to work for Redmond to hate Linux.....
I think their excuse of "it's just parody, if you can't take it go away lame geek" was rather poor. I've found some really funny paradies of Linux really before now, and that wasn't one of them. It was just some cheap fanboy ranting that attempts to make itself not suck by constantly telling people it's funny - where is the wit in saying:
Dunno about you, but I'm not laughing yet....
Just click the "Introducing Linux" link. It brings you to another msn page saying "Red Hat 9.0 is a boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows."
The following links aren't much better. They have this carefully hand-crafted look to them. "Alternatives to Linux", "Linux Training, only $2095 for 5 days", etc.
It's funny to see how far the world's biggest software company will go to bash free software rather than trying to beat them with better software. They've got enough spare cash to hire a hundred thousand programmers for ten years. They could basically write a new operating system from the ground up that runs almost anything on almost anything (assuming enough ram & hard disk space), and does it well, but instead they have probably under a thousand people developing their products and they're getting roughed up by dozens of open source teams of 1-20 active developers each. Not to mention that they sell a stripped down version of Windows to their main audience, when they could give everyone copies of their best version and only see a small drop in sales. Their licensing strategy is holding them back.
A quick search for best operating system results in:
Microsoft weigh in at number 21....
Do you need a website upgrade?
I agree, it does, and will, suck for the first few versions. But enough people will still use it because it is the default, and MS will make enough money selling ads to support their continuing to develop it.
But I don't think the analogy with Netscape is a good comparison. What allowed IE to seize the market share was that Netscape went dormant for a year while MS continued to advance. By the time Netscape woke up, they were far behind. That will not happen with Google. Google has a big head start, and I'm sure they will not just lay down and let themselves be run over like Netscape did.
I hope you are right about MS not being able to pull this off. They have failed quite a few times.
One more thing - watch for the next version of IE to lock out the Google Toolbar, probably in the name of security. Then I wouldn't be surprised if they use the DMCA club to keep it locked out.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
True, but version 5 and 6 still suck. It has something to do with their bizare goals. They are not in business to make a better browser, GUI, search engine or anything like that. They are in business to make money and they pervert their program's functionality to achieve that any way they can. So, M$'s GUI is sold like a billboard to the highest biders, their OS forces depencence on M$ servers, M$'s browser pushes whatever M$ feels like, Windoze updater breaks unix compatibility and their search engine delivers a message. Microsoft makes things do what it wants them to do, not what their custormers want.
A search for Linux cancer is instructive. Someone just reading the story summaries would conclude that The Register and O'Riely think Linux and the GPL are bad. Additionally, the casual reader would conclude that Linux vendors are going out of business and that Paladium is "clever". These quotes are so targeted and numerous that it must be intentional. I'll quote what it produced because, M$ is known to change things like this:
The more I look at that list, the more respect I have for the designers of that search engine. It's brilliantly able to force the Microsoft message into even the most hostile of mouths. Ha, they call me a troll and put atribute words to me I never wrote. Compare that to the results Google gives, which looks more like what the user would want to see. Microsoft is evil and this is what an evil search engine looks like. Oh well, thats one search engine I never used before and will never use again. I also don't read or watch MSNBC news, yes, they suck too.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And I'm saying that it's easy to accidently consider them part of the search. I did, and I was expecting something along those lines.
At some point, you have to say that being truthful but misleading goes too far. If you have something in your Policy Agreement twenty paragrahs in that says that the first seven hits are ads, I consider that not acceptable. Microsoft is numbering their ads as if they are actual search results. They label them as featured results. First of all, at least to my possibly not-cynical-enough brain, "featured" does not translate to "advertisement". It makes me think that perhaps this is a particularly useful or notable link. Second of all, when I search in Galeon, I see a medium-gray background with a hard-to-read, only slightly darker text stating that a given site is a featured site. It does not exactly stand out. (I cannot help but think that the fact that of all the websites I've seen in the past three months, the MSN one is the only one where using the default color choices in a non-IE browser is such that reading is annoying is somewhat nasty).
I agree that the author could have pointed out the "FEATURED" bit, but given that I made the same assumption, I don't think that it's all that egregious.
May we never see th
they see what users are doing, (using other people's sofware and innovations of course,) and launch something that they will include on their desktop for "free."
I thing that this should be easy enough to kill though through the anti-trust (ha ha ha ha, like M$ gives a shit about the law,) because its something external to the operating system and M$ should not be allowed to put it on their desktop AT ALL as anything else than a legitimate install process. They should be forced to compete like everybody else.
The alternative is to have the systems report bogus pages and broken to M$ web crawlers and spiders to shut them out of the useful information while leaving anybody else's search-engines go through untrameled.
After a while, people will get the hint "Wanna find shit, use NOT M$ because M$ search engine sucks and gives you a ton of broken links."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
# Latest News: microsoft
Microsoft warns of critical IE flaws (MSNBC - Aug. 21)
Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design (Washington Post - Aug. 24)
Microsoft finds security flaws (Boston Globe - Aug. 22)
I am not attached to labels. I have shot the buddha on the road. Symbols and dogma are not important, only spreading good karma.
Now, back to the topic: saying that MS is funding the SCO lawsuit isn't spreading neither Fear, Uncertainty nor Doubt. It is a fact: as the lawsuit was announced, MS bought a totally unnecessary Unix license for quite a large sum of money. I cannot say that they are directly funding the lawsuit, however the timing was highly suspicious, especially considering that MS would greatly benefit from SCO winning the case (which seems less likely every day). You may not have the same opinion as I have regarding this, however you cannot prove me wrong - and I do believe that to be the truth, therefore I am indeed abstaining from flase speech.
The RTFM attitude, the "end-luser" attitude, the "it works for me" mentality?
Actually, in the two years since I've started using Linux, I've nearly always found other Linux users to be helpful and polite. Not once was I ever told to RTFM. On the contrary, the great spirit of cooperation and general helfulness has been one of the things that has kept me with Linux.
Surely, I must also be a Microsoft employee since I don't like Linux and speak of it in public?
Not necessarily. But I am curious as to why you have such hostility towards Linux...If you do not have a personal stake in MS, why do you feel compelled to defend them even though they have shown themselves to be capable of such shady behavior? You aggressively attack anyone suggesting that MS might be involved...without offering any other counter-arguments than personal insults. In fact, you display the same kind of bad behaviour that you accuse Linux advocates of...however, speaking out of personal experience, I've seen much more personal insults coming out of anti-Linux posters than from pro-Linux ones (who generally aim their attacks at MS, not at invidual Windows users).
In other words, no, I do not spread FUD. But those anti-Linux web sites are. Why aren't you concerned with those? Oh, I forgot, you're not really interested in fair and balanced debate, just in tarnishing the free OS's name and the reputation of those who use it...
Reminder: find a new sig
Mircosoft has identified Linux as a 'threat', and will do anything they can to discourage people from migrating from their product.
Being a computer consultant, I have found that the vast majority of people I encounter already know Microsoft's software is slow, expensive, and a huge security risk. Unfortunatly their mission critical apps require it. I must add however, about 95% of them have their home page set to Google, or Google News, and many of those aren't even using IE even though its installed. Many are using Opera.
I have to say most of us have no love of Microsoft from a technical standpoint, but they make us money.
This is Microsoft's MO, and I doubt it will change any time soon. Consider who is backing SCO in their charge to cause problems in the Linux world...