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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
"Innovation" through assimilation.
Come on folks, RTFA. The article is just a bunch of rumors carefully worded to sound believable.
Try this.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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.
find / -name \* -exec grep -i -n $QUERY {} /dev/null \;
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
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.'
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According to this link, AskJeeves and Look Smart are the same company...
so is this a marketing hype to keep Google stocks cheap for a hostile takeover??
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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...
I knew I should have registered askclippy.com -- I coulda made a mint!
blog |
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
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"Derp de derp."
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
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
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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)