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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
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.
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?
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
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...
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...
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!
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
MS isn't stupid, it knows the desktop is a stagnant market. I think they'd want a search engine for, and heavily optimize it for:Google is a PC miracle. When MS gets a hold of some good search tech, they will integrate it into so many disparate things it'll become ubiquitous, and Google will be that cute desktop search engine that got swallowed up.
Or maybe, hopefully, not.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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
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)
As an aside, has anyone else noticed that Altavista and AllTheWeb have turned their websites into Google-clones?
This is a good thing; less cruft -- more searching.
Being an ex-jeviant, I know that Ask Jeeves is powered by Teoma for the algorithmic search results (try www.teoma.com) and a custom search engine for KB-style questions. Google is mostly comparable to the Teoma portion of Ask Jeeves. The KB-style search engine is, AFAIK, unique amongst all popular web search engines out today. Furthermore, this KB search service can produce some highly accurate and relevant search results. Unfortunately, it's not geared towards the /. crowd and your searches for GTK utilities, so you will always find it lacking. However, if you're a John Doe, looking for weather in boulder, you'll be more than happy.