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Microsoft Looks At Other Search Engines
ZuperDee writes "It looks like Microsoft is now looking for another search engine to buy. They are looking at Ask Jeeves and Looksmart, but they recently dumped Looksmart, after deciding that its results don't stack up well. So would anyone be surprised if they bought Ask Jeeves? It can't hurt that according to Netcraft, they already run Microsoft IIS."
I don't know anyone who uses anything but Google anymore.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
w007
I use win2k and stay away from XP so I don't have any idea if they have done something like that with it or not, so forgive my ignorance.
"Innovation" through assimilation.
ms blows!
Question #1 for Ask Jeeves, Where do you want to go today?
And it told me my search did not match with any Web results.
Come on folks, RTFA. The article is just a bunch of rumors carefully worded to sound believable.
Simple to use search engine for a simple to use OS. Not that rate any of them that highly.
... will it run Linux?
Try this.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Geez, how about buying a search engine that WORKS? I can't find shit on Radio Shack since their search engine was powered by Ask Jeeves.
hmmm
Microsoft smells the blood of an englishman!
Does this remind anyone else of a scene from ? The monster rampaging through the hamlet, tossing townspeople aside looking for his next victim?
The hunt is on!
Never argue with an idiot, he'll just lower you to his level and beat you with experience.
Doesn't Ask Jeeves use actual people to categorize their database? What benefit could microsoft get from aquiring that? (I also haven't gotten any useful search results from Jeeves in over 2 years now... but that's beside this point...)
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
Oh geez... such rumours are befitting of pump and dump schemes. Be careful!!!!!
Yea, I can see how you'd go from Google to Ask Jeeves. Maybe they'd be better off with this
Hotmail was purchased by MS, and it was running Unix boxes.
Granted, they were eventually converted, but it's more of a "what gets the job done" thing than a "what intergrates better" thing.
I don't understand why they need to buy an engine. It may be shortsighted of me, but building one would probably cost less and could be done failry quickly.
I built a small one and there only seems to be two major components of a search engine service (yes I realize this is very simplistic). The spidering of content (done with sheer horespower) and an indexing and the search algorithm. Seems fairly straightforward to me. What I learned was that the algorithm and indexing was not the problem but the processing power needed to spider the entire net efficiently.
If they buy Ask Jeeves, they'll be buying the one 'search engine' that's actually LESS useful then MSN search. Honestly, it's a poor man's Alltheweb metasearch, and the only interesting pre-defined question it's able to answer is Is Jeeves gay?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
__
Lets ask Jeeves
"...but they recently dumped Looksmart, after deciding that its results don't stack up well"
Or that its name was a contradiction of their image.
find / -name \* -exec grep -i -n $QUERY {} /dev/null \;
You apear to be seatching the Internet. Would you like to
- Search the net.NET?
- Use SiteFinder?
Why can't they just use this to index the web? Seems to me that since they already have an indexing engine that they should be touting this.... isn't it powerful enough? I guess maybe they are afraid that it might crash everytime someone searches for "Slashdot".....
Me gonna go write me open source software and grow long beard and smokum some weedus and ummmm hide from people
... is more in line with Clippy & his pals. Ask Jeeves would be a better fit for Microsoft that most of the alternatives just based on this "aesthetic" consideration...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
When will Microsoft issue a "patch" for Internet Explorer that removes the ability to search with Google in the "Find On the Internet..." feature?
Most businesses in today's market are trying to retract into their core product. Microsoft is doing the opposite and trying to branch out into as many markets as possible(again). IMHO this may not be the best business approach for them.
Sometimes it is better to focus on one thing and make a killing at it. Instead they are making a little profit here, a little profit there.. I guess it keeps the government off your back for being an OS monopoly, though. But do they really think that is a problem as Apple and RedHat stock and market share keep rising?
Probably about 4 or 5 years back? They were trying to decide whether they wanted to become a technology company selling natural language query stuff... or whether they wanted to become a search engine/portal that was so popular at that time...
Odd company, never use their site... I think they only exist for a takeover bid.
--D
I love Google, but realistically speaking, it sounds as if investors are setting themselves up for another Dot com bust. There is no way on the planet Google is worth 1 billion US dollars. Sure they provide an excellent service, but to think that it's worth anything more than a couple of million is a farce.
Google has around US$700-million in annual revenues, and it makes about US$100-million a year in profits. Google is growing better than 20% every 12 months. source
They (Google) should have taken what Moneybags was offering while the going was getting hot. Now it seems like they want to be a slight be greedy, which in this economy with it's uncertainty due to political factors, Israel, (fake)War on tError, etal, it's likely they're going to luck out. Heck even Warren Buffett is taking his money elsewhere, and anyone in the economics field knows he knows how to make money.
MoFscker
Maybe it's possible that Microsoft will somewhat partially involves itself in a potential business
relation that would certainly prove to be something undeterminate with uncertain effect on
search engines and potentially the internet.
I'm not sure, though.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Has anyone had any luck with ask jeeves? the last time I tried it, the damn thing sucked. It's a horrible idea and probably even worse technology.
... why don't they just make one themselves?
That is all.
I just said it two days ago:
Ok, so I guess now that Google has declined the buyout, Microsoft will declare war on them. They'll probably buy one of the lesser search engines, church it up a bit, slap some generic name on it like "Pinpoint" or "Searchlight" or some shit like that, market the hell out of it, and make it the default for every possible search function that exists in Windows.
Only time will tell if I'm right if the subsequent phrases in my above prediction also turn out to be true.
And I'd like to set the record straight. MS is *NOT* looking to buy another search engine. MSN Search already has a very large share of the total # of search queries (second only behind google), and MS has put a large ammount of money into developing its own search backend.
So why would they buy someone with low marketshare and no real technology? MSN was interested in google for its technology and market share, they already have market share and have invested in development of their own technology.
Please stop with these stupid "MS is going to be x engine" posts, its all speculation, and not even good speculation at that.
Who the hell moderated this as Insightful? Put down the crackpipe, whoever you are. This post is about as insightful as a 3 year-old picking its nose.
Geez... even THEY should be able to calculate the security risks to the search engine if they buy Jeeves...
The three-way action also highlights where much of the power in the Linux realm resides.
You said "three-way action"
Huh huh, huh huh huh
I think I should also point out that Ask Jeeves also own Teoma, which is absolutely nothing to be sneezed at.
Not only that, but Microsoft has a world-class research arm with Microsoft Research. With Microsoft Research's world-class research, and Microsoft's deep pockets, you can bet that any improvements Teoma would need to compete with Google WILL be made.
There is no way the FTC will approve this. While the Justice Department may not have handled this case, the FTC has been handling corporate buy-outs and mergers decently for a while.
lynx -dump kungfunix.net/shaolin|sed -n '1!G;h;$p' & echo fear
MoFscker
will they change it to AskClippy.com???
"Hey it looks like you're searching the internet."
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
But they're not dumb enough to buy a company that runs off one of their products.
I for one, welcome our Microsoft overlords buying Ask Jeeves, and piss my pants from happiness. One service worth another. I used Ask Jeeves maybe twice and in both cases I left heavily pissed off. Following their advice I was asking plain english questions like "Where do I find X" and got 100 answers to questions "Where do I find Y" where Y = [Omega] \ X. I'd be really glad if Ask Jeeves went where it really belongs, simultaneously with Microsoft wasting their $$$ on a worthless service.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Won't work because...
Nobody with an income less then six figure ever said, "Go ask Jeeves."
"Did you Jeeves it?" just don't have the same ring.
When was the last time you saw a butler with GoOgle eyes?
And finally.. if something went wrong.. You know who did it already!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
it smacks of unfairness to me that a company can leverage its desktop monopoly to buy technology/experience/credibility in a market that it can't penetrate on its own. i understand that many rich companies do it - so this isn't isolated to MS. it just seems that with MS, their strategy of purchase, integrate, become more powerful is inherently unfair.
;)
someone needs to take MS to court for antitrust. oh wait....
smd4985
story
They just need to take their Indexing Service and combine it with their Agent technology to create "Ask Clippy." Surely, they won't have to do much to make this work. And we all know it doesn't have to work well for them to dominate the market!
I wonder if Microsoft would want to rank sites based on which server software they were running? It would be an incentive for independent publishers to use the right software.
They use the CYC AI database thecnology so that you can ask a question in plain english..(much better than all the over "dumb" search engines combined). I find that the Ask search engine is better at finding stuff that the dumber search engines are not capable of remotely gettin close too. As far as microsoft buying them, I am not too exitied about that company owning more things in the whole universe, it's bad enough that 98% of all computers runs their crap OS's, and that they spend all their time constantlly changing (but not improve) their languages and OS's (to take over the world), now they have grabbed of the better search engines.
= 9J =
According to Netcraft, microsoft.com is using Linux servers. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.micro soft.com
The bumpersticker explicitly directed to "Fuck with Texas"!
Microsoft should buy DogPile, since that's what comes to mind when people think Microsoft anyway.
and at that a brand name unrelated to them might be far more worth than a really good search engine made in house.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
. . . as Ask Microsoft Bob.
Maybe they want Taoma which was hyped as using techniques similar to google but seems to be pretty limited by the fact that it seems like the only way to get your site listed is to pay them.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
If M$ still wants Google, it is still available, though maybe not at as good a price. M$ has enough money to just buy up all of Google's IPO shares. Maybe not enough to be a majority stockholder, but enough to threaten to dump their shares and run the stock price into the ground.
Yahoo!, I'm excited, google is safe, who'll they buy though, I better ask Jeeves?
The source you cited:
Google has around US$700-million in annual revenues, and it makes about US$100-million a year in profits. Google is growing better than 20% every 12.
If that's correct, then Google is worth a lot more than $1 billion. Nitpick: And this is finance, not economics.
But yeah, that Buffet guy not only picks great stocks, he makes a mean marguerita.
The reason Google rocks is that Pagerank does a half-decent job of understanding what pages to show people in what order based on their queries, and that's because of a lot of Deep Thought and Experimentation by the Google folks. Another reason they're pleasant to use is that Google doesn't waste page space on clutter - other than a friendly low-res non-animated logo at the top, it's basically just a box for your query, a few links to extra features, and your answers when they come back. (Remember Hotbot, the Wired MegaCluttery Singing Dancing Search Engine?) The initial core of the PageRank algorithm was pretty simple - the concept was that if people build links to a page, it's probably interesting to them, and if lots of people build links to a page, it's more likely to be very interesting than a page that not many people bother linking to. Getting much beyond that is where the Rocket Science happens, and also where they run into occasional algorithm clashes (e.g. Blogger as an edge case), and into conflicts with site promoters who take sites that aren't inherently interesting and try to get Google to rank it higher by trying to put in features Google's robots look for rather than by putting in content that actual people find interesting. (Remember that Search King guy with the link farms?)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Are at Satirewire.
Microsoft-IIS/6.0 on Linux
Gee I didn't know you could run IIS 6.0 under linux.
Akamai runs linux, akamai caches much of the enormous volume of traffic generated by windowsupdate.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think it's something other than a search engine that they have in mind, for which they need the search engine technology as a component, but i'm not entirely sure what that is. Their recent announcement that they're going to use IBM's PowerPC chips instead of intel for their next generation xbox makes their purchase of VirtualPC's connectix more than just a strategic takeover to threaten apple, as it'll enable them to emulate intel on the powerPC so their next Xbox will be backward compatible with current games. Microsot probably has something they want to roll out and they don't wanna wait to build a search engine from scratch; can anyone guess what that might be...
many succeed in providing genuine inf. re: stuff that matters, whilst avoiding touting phonIE ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys for corepirate nazi felons.
howsonever, robbIE's still got the eyeballs/momeNTdumb, so we're hanging in 'til the last postIE.
lookout bullow. the daze of the felonious georgwellian fuddite payper liesense corepirate nazi stock markup FraUD execrable, is WANing into coolapps/the abyss, at the speed of right (see also: slowly).
consult with/trust in yOUR creator.... the lights are coming up now. see you there.
tell 'em robbIE?
I can see why they'd want Google (name recognition + superior software technology). But why would they go after a who-dat like Looksmart? Has it really gotten to the point where 'innovation' in Redmond means 'wait for someone else to invent, then by them out'?
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
It's just a general term. Probably not much different than the spoke you're already on.
Even if this is nothing more than a collection of rumors, as has been postulated elsewhere, the mere possibility that a purchase like this could happen tends to make me think that another DoJ action is long overdue. Although it would be nice to see a decision -- and penalty -- with some teeth in it, this time.
Here's hoping that someone at the FTC has the sense to say "You've got to be kidding..."
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
SERCH 4 IT FEWL
Would they then claim that ASk Jeeves is an integral part of their OS?
I knew I should have registered askclippy.com -- I coulda made a mint!
blog |
Here you are, get on TEH SPOKE!
"Innovation" through assimilation.
This isn't the first time an organization has conquered the world without any significant original ideas. Conquest is a skill unto itself. Often those skilled at conquest are poor at innovation, and vice versa. Just think of all the engineers who have gotten screwed by selling the rights to world-changing inventions for next to nothing. On the other side, hell, think of the Roman empire -- they basically stole all their good ideas from the Greeks. Can you name a single notable Roman mathematician? There was probably a notable Roman philosopher or two, but I can't think of anyone immediately.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Google: Mom!! Microsoft is looking at me again!!
do() || do_not();
Is Jeeves Gay?
Microsoft is currently engaged in a semi-secret project to make it's own search engine ...already in the testing stage with roll out expected withing a year. Talking about mega server farm technology here. Writing the engine in C#
OK.
First of all, Google is something different. 75% of web referrals come from it. 75%.
This is sort of sad in one interesting way -- The Internet Archive is complete. Without the State of Google at any given time, the archive is incomplete. Archiving the state of Google...
Now that's a hard problem.
Google's success did come from their ease of use and their several-order-of-magnitude improvement over their predecessors (Altavista, mainly, but Hotbot too). The Google challenge really was incredible -- "Put in what you're looking for. It'll be one of the top links. Be as obscure as you want." And they won the challenge.
I'm Feeling Lucky really is an amusingly cocky creation -- "our top link is likely enough to be the right one that we don't even need to show you a list."
It works.
Anyway, adoption was driven by the order of magnitude improvement, and is now very hard to clone -- going from 10 to 1000 is easier than 1000 to 1000000, by far. It's not enough to be equal - - you need to be better, at a degree than is actually possible for search to provide.
But once Google was adopted, it needed to stay in a position of power. Here's where the "niceness" of Google -- "don't do anything evil" -- won. Combine a Stanford Geek lackadasiacal attitude to all corrupting influences, no details about financial hardship, and massive street cred, and you get the snowball that brought us to 75% today.
Google was even allowed to sell ad space, given the "reluctance" and "geekily targeted" (has anyone else made targeting not seem like a privacy violation?) nature of their system. It's very interesting the nature of identity for a particular behavior -- basically, we assign motive to all actions that we see, as a mechanism for predicting future behavior. Google has motives that align with our interests -- a high quality, stable, authoritative source for what we're looking for. So it gets away with things that...say...Microsoft can't.
Microsoft would destroy the Google brand. They can't even donate money to schools without people thinking they're trying to brainwash kids! Meanwhile, Apple's been donating systems to grade schools since all of us were in them. The idea of a non-independent Google is fundamentally uninteresting, and really does create a new market segment:
What Google Used To Be.
Obviously, this is in nobody's interest, except maybe for other search engines. So shockingly enough, no sale.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Imagine what would happen if Google were to vanish tomorrow. It would drastically reduce productivity of organizations the world over, and not necessarily those that are related to computers.
Same has been said about dozens of other companies, and that argument is null0. You're taking it to the extreme. Sure Google is fine, but their are other alternatives. People will bitch and moan but life will go on.
Today, Google is almost a crutch for a lot of people. Right from Universities to workplaces, its almost like the defacto tool. Don't know an answer? Can't find something? Google it.
It's a novelty not a necessity. Remember, in the days before Google, people had other search engines, and dare I say it, encyclopedias, and other mediums. If Google went down today it would not affect me, nor my company.
Are companies willing to let this happen? Sure, you have a million other search engines. But it sure as hell would hurt (and hurt badly) if Google were to go.
You hit the nail in the coffin. It would hurt some, but it's not a catastrophe.
This is something that could be leveraged to investors' benefit> Here you have, a *very* large chunk of the Internet being dependent on *one* tool. Who's willing to make sure that it does not go away? Think about it
You're reaching for a rope with oil all over it. Again, what can Google do that others can't? Not much. Offer a little more found documents.
MoFscker
I thought Microsoft said they were the leader of innovation? If so why don't they innovate a new search engine technology instead of buying someone elses? Or has MS always meant "buy out" when they said "innovate"?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Someone shit in your cracker jacks.
If that's not a spoiler I don't konw what is!@
I wonder if Microsoft really wants a search engine to help their security experts find their own asses with both hands in the dark.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Memo to Microsoft ...
I know you own a lot of stuff, so it may be simply lost in the pile somewhere... but, you already own a search engine! It's called MSN, and its search functionality is already incorporated in Internet Explorer, your widely used web browser, remember?
If you can't pull decent marketshare with that setup, I doubt you'll be able to do it with another service!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Or Microsoft could just sue you out of there. That what Nissan did to Nissan Computer Company
Meanies.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
but I have a hard time believing that they run it on the back end. In fact I just did a quick google search for teoma.com and solaris and found a corporate Ask Jeeves website listing job openings. Most of their job openings actually sound a lot more like they're doing *nix development than Windoze development. Most of the *nix types of jobs are in Piscataway, NJ, which is where the company Teoma that they bought a few years back is located. So I'm guessing that they use IIS to make their pretty front ends but they use solaris and/or linux on the back end. I doubt Microsoft would like that fact if they really are interested in buying them!
Kartoo is helpful when you're not having luck with the obvious google searches. You can start with a more broader search, and then use the results it brings up to refine you search. Errr, just go play with it, and you'll see.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Netscape v. IE..Browser wars-M$ won...but soon that will change...
now it is...
M$N search engine and however many others there are v. Google...search engine war...result: remains to be seen...micro$oft will try to buy their way to victory...
"You ought not to practice childish ways, since you are no longer that age."
-Homer
IIS aside, I would bet they go for a pay-per-click site tied into the next Windows...
Then they can get revenue from customers who 'choose' to upgrade, and get revenue from web sites, that is if they want to be found at all by Windows PCs.
You gotta pay to get found first - or end up on page 348 of 5000...
- Anyone ever use MSN?
It has never really been "their thing" to looksmart, anyway.
Microsoft has made it clear that it aims to become a major player in the search sector, and has been investing heavily in developing its own search technology over the past year.
Bill Gate's Dictionary:
Develop (v) - to acquire or steal competition's software or design ideas.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
That may have made them one of the largest deployers of Linux out there.
Ironic isnt it. Course I'd love for them to try getting all those google servers to run IIS
There have been stories in the news about how MS is developing their own search engine to compete with Google, including quotes from MS people about how their "algorithmic search" was so much better than the competition. It would appear that MS top execs think that this project has failed, else why would they be looking to buy a search engine?
It seems that every time Microsoft is going to "innovate", all they do is buy something that someone else already came up with (and that someone else may have actually not even been the first) and then use their PR people to give is a shiny, happy, friendly name. Microsoft wants to knock Google out of the water and since they can't buy them, they are going to try and find the second best search engine and buy that instead. Then they will add the MS logo, a nice friendly face and add some new noob terminology to it to make it "new" and "different".
So... if I go out to the audio store and buy THE second best home theater system and remove the names and button labels and put my own "brand" on it and friendly button text like, "Honey, press this button when you want to listen to a CD when I'm not home" or "Press this button for movies from the satellite", can I then say I "innovated"? I think not.
This is why I STILL bristle when I hear people claiming that Microsoft innovates when the answer is staring them right in the face. Innovating is more than simply taking someone else's work and making a few name changes while adding some dubious functionality. Innovating is taking existing concepts/technologies/ideas and COMBINING them in ways that NO ONE ELSE has ever done before. Microsoft does NOT do this.
There is a boatload more innovation happening in the open source/free software world. OSS/Free is a much better environment to innovate in because the tools that they provide are so much more specialized than Windows and have ways of being interconnected. Windows is sorely lacking in this ability unless you are willing to pay the costs to get development tools.
This whole search engine fiasco is just more of the same. They are going to buy someone else's search engine, integrate it into MSN, make sure it gets integrated into their OS and apps in some fashion and then stick friendly names and fuzzy warm feelings (not too warm though... might be mistaken for being a commie) all over it. Then market it to death with that goddamned butterfly dork making people feel like Microsoft actually gives a rat's ass.
Disgusting.
Un-news
Why doesn't microsoft invest some money into their own programmers to actually MAKE ONE. I know its hard to believe microsoft make something of their own.. chances are it cant be done. But hey.. maybe
looksmart isnt all that great, most of their services are sub-par and not useful to most people, I also think they back spam spyware, which is probably why M$ backed off on them..
I've never had any luck with ask jeeves.. I found the interface kinda, well, blah.
so even if those two did get bought out, I dont think they'd be missed that much, google was the piece of meat microsoft wanted, now all they're left with are the scraps.
Microsoft should just drop this one venture, seeing as search engines arent a prominent source of income and they're kind of in their own field.
there's not entirely a lot to gain from monopolizing search engines, because you cant. it's a field where their money doesnt have power. you cant sway people into your search engine unless you have quality, something which microsoft often lacks. all someone has to do is create another google-like search engine and microsoft would go quietly into the night in the search engine business, the only way they can monopolize is if they managed to control the net, or control windows users into only using THEIR search. which would turn off their serious customers.
this is a field where microsoft cant win, or if they do, the victory will be a sour one.
desktops - yeah
servers - sorta
gaming consoles - yeah
misc technologies - sorta
search engines and other freely available services that can provide competition.. - slim chance.
In order for them to succeed, they cant have competition, and even in the gaming consoles, their competition is easily knocked away if they sign developers exclusively to their platform..
but search engines... it would be a rather weak market for them to deal with, with plenty of competition, because ANYONE can create a search engine.
I'm a software developer and I hear managers saying this sort of stuff all the time. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing rings true on many an occasion.
g hemawat.pdf or, in HTML, http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:m0TMQYgIlIoJ: www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat .pdf+google+file+system&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
.NET improvements, etc.
A simple search engine is simple to create. If it has one user, it only has to contend with one user. Hell, you could even write in VB or Delphi and plug it into a lovely Access database.
Try scaling your search engine up to thousands or millions of users and millions of pages and see if it still holds up. I'm sure you may come across the concurrency issues you didn't even realise existed or the performance limitations of the technologies you chose that you weren't aware of.
To illustrate my point, try reading about Google's custom file system. http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-
This will show you the months of thought and years of development that are required for a world class search engine. That PDF covers just one aspect.
Yes, Microsoft could write a search engine, I'm pretty sure they will, but it will take them time, cost them loads and may actually work out more expensive than buying an existing one. Not to mention the swarms of developers an investment that will be tied up that could be better deployed working on Longhorn or
Powered by onion juice.
This is why google is the best...
.NET
.net delegate
= fogg&cat=web& cs=utf-8&q=.net+delegate&_sb_lang=pref
T F-8&oe=UTF -8&q=.net+delegate&btnG=Google+Search
Searching for information on Delegates in
Search string:
AlltheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?avkw
Google
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=U
Now normally this should be modded down. But it is so funny, it is almost sad!
So which is is? "full" or "stupid liberals"?
They aren't looking for Jeeves, I can guarantee you they want another of their products... Teoma which is already the most google-like competitor out there. (besides AllTheWeb which isn't hurting)
Today I had to use the XP's built in "help" system. None of they keywords I tried gave _any_ results, and after four tries it hung.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
www.msn.com
Try it, you can find anything you want. Maybe not.
She used to use msn search. Only becouse that's what IE went to when she pressed *search*.
:)=)
But then I showed her about google. And managed to find the school results for *some-sport* my littlesister had been in two years earlier.
And that file was in excel format. She then spent the next 2 hours searching for everything about all she knew. *This is fun!* she said
I also showed her Mozilla couse of IE crashing all the time. But she could not use the wheel-mouse button to scroll. You know the scroll icon that shows in almost all windows programs when you want to scroll by pressing the wheel.. not spin it.
Any ideas on how to get this to work?
I know this messes with X's paste thing. But still?
She is using Win2k so the wheel-paste thing don't matter.
The thing is that Google's problems are solely because of their success. The problems all come from the fact that it has become advantageous for various groups to pollute Google's results.
If MS actually succeeds in getting anywhere, they will neatly trash Google's main problem, as it will no longer make quite as much sense to base entire business plans around tricking PageRank.
Moreover: Yeah, Google's having problems. However, Google's goal at this point is solely based around trying to circumvent cheaters. They have lots of time and energy to focus on that. They don't really have anything else to focus on. MS's goal is just to catch up with Google. And once they do that, do you honestly think that they will not have people creating huge numbers of sites just to trick their search engine too?
Any advantage MS would have due to Google abuse would be rediculously short lived. Now, given, this would still allow MS to get a pretty strong beachhead and a strong start, which could be helpful, but MS is historically not good at strong starts. What they're good at is weak starts, a few failed versions, a version 3 that is "good enough", and a version 4 which actually finally starts to cause big problems for their enemies. The abuse&bitrot problems would start to set in for MS-Search at about the time of that firstly-acceptable version 3..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I am looking to
"ask Bill"
Netcraft confirms: *Microsoft is BYING
Vonal Declosion
Microsoft's interest in Ask Jeeves, Inc. is not about Ask Jeeves, the pose-a-search-query-in-the-form-of-a-question search engine. It's interest obviously lies in Teoma, whose search site has potential to be the 'next google'.
Depending on how all this shakes out, maybe Google's future IPO will be its downfall and its search relevance gets sacrificed for the sake of profit. This might send searches scrambling to a new search engine.
Backed with some MS marketing might, it may very well play out a decent move for MS because Teoma's results are actually pretty decent.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
It would be better if they just hired Miss Cleo. That way, their searches would be televised as well!!
That's what they often do. Scores of Borland people went to Microsoft, for example.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.askje eves.com
says it's apache for www.askjeeves.com, but it's IIS for ask.com
Oli
Jeeves natural language front end is a perfect fit for M$'s neophyte base.
As others have stated, nobody uses anything but google anymore. M$ can deliver millions of users to Jeeves and keep it alive.
Google doesn't need M$, but by spurning M$'s offer, Google has assured itself that there will be another 800 pound gorilla it will have to deal with. It wouldn't suprise me if natural language was the default google search within 2 yrs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One thing that's always amused me is how much easier it is to find Microsoft's own Knowledge Base articles using Google rathen than searching for them straign off the Microsoft Support web page. I can Google for Q303351 (just a random example that happenes to be on my clipboard this afternoon) and I always get what I want. It doesn't always work that way when I search Microsoft. Plus, MS has made their site non-IE hostile, and dumbed-down the knowledge base search interface, making it almost impossible to find somewhat more obscure KB articles. Using Microsoft's search capabilities I have to play "keyword roulette" and thankfully with Google I don't.
uhm MS already has their search engine integrated into the OS yet everyone seems to forget
open IE and press the search button, see that page on the left ? thats MSN search (complete with encrypted scripts to prevent you from looking at whatever evil they are up to, why else would you encrypt your javascript even though Joe user isnt likly to view source on a page that prohibits right click ?)
Ok now open a folder in explorer and type a word in the address bar, and hey presto you are redirected again to MSN search (which cannot be switched off either even if you disable it)
so MS already have the monopoly on search in the OS and have done since win98 yet everyone seems to overlook it.
What are the reasons MS would want a search engine? Is it just the money from advertising or what? I'm just curious. It doesn't seem like owning a search engine would directly increase sales of any of their other products. Normally when they want to take over a segment where the product is free to the consumer it at least encourages sales of some other product of theirs.
However, I worry about Microsoft entering the search engine market more than it has. I see a strong conflict of interest between providing good search results and shilling for their company and/or those who pay them.
There's some evidence that Microsoft is already being tainted by this conflict of interest. On a lark, I went to www.msn.com and used their "Search the Web" option... and searched for information on Microsoft competitors. I found several cases where Microsoft's search engine gave higher priority to what would make Microsoft more money (as opposed to what the user probably wanted to see), such as Microsoft's official position on the matter:
This didn't happen all the time. Searches for specific company names ("Red Hat", "Oracle") did okay. But this happened often enough to make it appear that their search engine intentionally returns Microsoft's "message" first, even if it's not what the user wanted. It smacks dangerously close to censorship. This certainly raises the concern that the conflict of interest might impact what users could see; this suggests that this impact is already occurring. And conflict of interest is always something worth considering.
If Microsoft was simply one of many search engines that might not matter, but there's a good chance they'd use their dominant desktop marketshare position to inhibit competition by other search engines. Look what Microsoft did with Netscape, integrating a product to make it difficult to use a competing product. Microsoft was convicted, but that conviction did not restore competition in the marketplace (or cause any other real change). If Microsoft became the near-dominant search engine, then this conflict of interest could result in people being unable to speak out or sell a competing product ... because there
would be no way for people to learn of the
dissent or an alternative product.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
What if he's being portentious?
- learn to swim.
Google will probably do better, if the two go into head to head competition. MS is giving every appearance of doing so, placing a bid for google (and getting rejected) being a major indicator.
1. Google's adds are unobtrusive, that sets it apart from other search services, and almost any other free service on the web for that matter. Microsoft would do well to follow google on this one, it's a major part of the reason that Google is successful.
2. Google is working on lots of useful tools, some of which may eventually be incorporated into our information seeking lexicon, just as google itself has. Microsoft may spend billions in R&D to come up with some innovations of it's own, more likely it will take a shortcut and buy up someone else's.
3. Google has good results, probably better than any of it's competitors currently, and who really uses any other services these days? Which leads to my third point:
4. 'I'm going to switch to Microsoft's search engine! Its *gotta* be better and I'm tired of that familiar, easy to use, well engineered Google site.' Not likely to happen. Why would I stop using google when it has served me well for years?
5. Unless.. Microsoft is hoping to get users by tying their search functionality into all of their products. Which they are most certainly going to do. IE and IIS will most likely have many hard coded references to MSN's search tools. Many people will simply be satisfied to use what's given to them.. IFO don't have a need for any Microsoft products anymore, so I'm outside the range of this marketing strategy.
TallGreen CMS hosting
InfoSpace is located in Seattle, very near Microsoft/Redmond, and has acquired DogPile, MetaCrawler, and WebCrawler. http://www.infospaceinc.com/sd/consumers.php
Whatever happended to Yahoo, being the supreme search engine? What the heck..now they have email and messengers...
In other words, Netscape got marketshare by being first while Google got marketshare by being best.
For Microsoft to beat Netscape, they had to create a better browser than a company that had never had real competition. For Microsoft to beat Google, they have to create a better search engine than a company whose search engine blew away a large number of other competitors in a competitive market.
So don't be too quick to bet against Google.
The cake is a pie
They're now going to be known as Ask Clippy!
how 'bout I give you the finger....and you give me my phone call.
Dogpile, Metacrawler use IIS as well.
Google lately has been consistently returning large numbers of useless matches in the first pages of many of my searches.
The two categories most affected are searches for information on specific products and on things like restaurants and hotels.
With product searches, I almost always have to wade through a lot of "Read opinions and get latest prices on..." crap before I find any really useful links. And I'm not just being cranky - most of said craplinks do not actually contain any reviews, they just contain maybe a couple prices and the opportunity to "be the first to review..."
With restaurants and hotels I get a lot of similar stuff, ranging from fake (or "under construction") yellow pages to unpopulated review sites. Almost all of them try to sell me ads.
Now, I realize I can get better results by putting in more specific search terms, like "vaio geforce p4 ddr" or similar, but that's not much of a solution. And it's certainly no help to Mr. Sixpaque.
It seems to me these are very much the kinds of searches people would be likely to enter into "Start->Search->On the Internet..." in Windows.
And even if MS skewed results dramatically towards their advertisers or themselves, at the moment it would still be easy to beat Google in terms of usefulness to the non-geek on these types of subjects.
I like Google and I hope they improve and stay on top.
But if I were Gates, I'd most definitely be thinking of having a default internet search in Windows that average users would not readily ditch in favor of Google.
This Like That - fun with words!
no way! laughter is the best medicine. Well, it's the best you will find if you can't search site:.edu
-pyrrho
...I've got your full immersive end-user search engine experience right here.
So now MS can use Ask Jeeves to find the answer to "Where do you want to go today?"
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
It is a pretty nice concept, but the actual implimentation had proven problematic (of ask jeeves). They are lucky they do not get that much use, because their infrastructure is barely functional even for the little traffic they do get. They recently (a year ago) fired most of their technical staff, so they don't really have people who knows how their engine even works anymore.
Ask Jeeves would simply never compete with Google in it's present form, and could never be scaled under it's present IIS based architecture to ever do it no matter how many windows servers they try to run.
Well, I think MS is better of buying Terra-Lycos. It is REALLY cheap, and they are suppose to a heck of worldwide presence.
Maybe not.
Ahh, Microsoft and ask.com in bed together...who could imagine?
He was the CTO at Overture now owned by Yahoo. He joined them in 1999, acquired AltaVista, and pioneered paid listings. He is now with MSN Search.
Maybe some of you heard him at search conferences. At Search Engine Strategies in Boston 3/03, he had some interesting comments about relevance and context. SES will be in NYC in 04.
MBA from Wharton, MS CS from John Hopkins, BSE from Princeton.
--
What is the second most searched word today after SEX? According to wordtracker.com it is GOOGLE.
This search has performed an illegal operation and must be shutdown immediately. If you continue to get this error message, please contact the program vendor.
(!)Fatal Error
This search engine has become unstable and must shutdown now.
(OK)
Guess we won't coining a new phrase to search the web anytime soon...better Google that to make sure.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
The embarasment was that when they tried to move the hotmail service to MSFT products, they failed miserably.