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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."
There was also a time once when people said "But does anyone use anything but Netscape nowdays anyway?"
Google Toolbar is SPYWARE!
That's a good question. Why would MS purchase any company since they have the horsepower to build anything that they want?
I belive the answer lays more in "Who would MS be removing from the existing market?" MS seems more interested in elbowing their way to the table, whatever table that be, than they do in really creating something new. When they do this, they remove the competition and become the defacto leader. Where have we seen this behavior before?
That seems to be their strategy overall. Simply wait until a new technology starts to catch on, and after the first movers have failed, then swoop in and purchase up everything that's left, forcing their way to "innovator" status....who's gonna say that they are not?...all those companies have been assimilated.
I'm pleased that google rebuffed them.... I can't imagine MS doing better than Google. They can't under-cut Google on price either!....I think that the only avenue they have open is to force their own site as the default for IE. That would be another anti-trust violation, and easy for even dumb judges to spot as obvious.
Their options seem pretty limited now, purchase a second rate search engine or develop on their own. Either way, "it's going to be a long hard slog" as Donald Rumsfield would say.
I think you are looking it at it differently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> It may be shortsighted of me, but building one
;)
> would probably cost less and could be done failry
> quickly.
Building one wouldn't remove a potential competitor though.
If you can get a search engine AND make it easier to dominate the market, AND the price difference between the two is within reason.. why not just assimilate someone?
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
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).
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
I wonder why google doesnt parse the page for redirects, and drop the rank if the page does? You know, I bet that might be in the next version of google. I almost always search for 4 to 8 word strings, enclosed in quotation marks, and I've actually been landing on trap sites with those. That's scary! But their weakness is they all do a redirect. Why couldnt google preparse the pages to see if the text and background colors are the same, or close? Those pages should get dropped too. Google does rule, look through my post history to see how much I rant about them. But, they are getting worse, a little. But they can catch up.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Uh, they've been doing that for ages. Apparently it's not working well enough...
DNA just wants to be free...
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.
And that would be great for everyone. Google will not sit still either, so we should expect to see better and better search capabilites from both camps. Real competition. Gee, what a thought. Or has someone already patented it as a business process?
If they are trying to read tea leaves, they focused on the wrong part of the story. MS doesn't need the best search engine. Many MSN subscribers will use the search engine they are given. They want a way to make MONEY off search engines. That's what an Overture exec brings, experience with how to do pay-per-click placements in a search engine.
This is particularly important now that Overture is a wholly owned part of Yahoo. It is also important because Overture has partnered with Gator (er, Claria) to pop Overture ads by snooping on users who are using other search engines like Google.
If you want to talk about scary, think what would happen if Microsoft put a Gator-like ad engine in Longhorn and tied it to their own home grown pay-per-click search engine. Come to think of it, every day at the computer would be like watching a Nascar race. All those pretty logos.
Wouldn't it be much easier to create a report function to alert google of a redirect or a site with malitious codes? Seems a bit simpler than ponying up the extra bandwidth to parse every page that comes up on a search (usually 20k+).
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.
"With the millions that MS has to invest in an engine it's likley that they'll be able to provide just slighly better results than Google"
THis will never work for Microsoft. You have to pay them for money to get anywhere in the listings they have now. How will that change? All you will get is a list of high paying advertisers. Microsoft is to greedy they will never make it in the search engine business.
No way.
Yes, I agree that the two major components of a search engine are hardware and the algorithm, but hardware is the easy part, IMHO. Think about it. Google simply throws away broken hardware instead of trying to fix it, that's how cheap it is. And on balance, how much hardware do you really need? A cluster of supercheap computers doesn't sound like a tall order. They don't even have to be really, 100% reliable. With the dot com crash, there are tons of empty buildings designed to do nothing but hold vast racks of computers. There's a huge warehouse near me that was converted into a server farm warehouse, and now it sits empty. Get a few of those and fill them up. Spidering is easy. It's easy to build a program that does nothing except search for links, follow them, and save the pages to disk.
The algorithm, on the other hand, is tricky. Google really innovated by deciding to rank pages based on the number of links they get. Google, or someone else, probably has that idea patented up the wazoo. Someone really has to come up with a new idea for indexing sites. Perhaps we need to go back to a Yahoo! style directory service, where actual humans rate the content? Or maybe we need some sort of AI to handle indexing? Easier said than done. Even user-ratings services, such as TopSites(Got a spam from them earlier today) have problems in that someone could easily rig up a bot to go vote multiple times. Anyone want to put in an idea on how the next gen search engine should work?
While I wouldn't put it past MS to cheat by breaking functionality of another application (*cough* Netscape *cough*), I think it'd be pretty obvious if they tried to do it to Google.
How would you break Google functionality? By corrupting IE's CGI support? That'd be pretty obvious (as well as damning to other sites).
While I wouldn't underestimate what Google is up against hopefully they've got smart people running the operation who have learned from past examples of M$ crushing the opposition. Arrogance contributed as much to the downfall of Netscape (Wordperfect and Lotus as well perhaps?) as M$'s dirty tricks.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.